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2024.3

Conditional expression with negated condition

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Last modified: 03 December 2024

Reports conditional expressions whose conditions are negated.

Flipping the order of the conditional expression branches usually increases the clarity of such statements.

Use the Ignore '!= null' comparisons and Ignore '!= 0' comparisons options to ignore comparisons of the form obj != null or num != 0. Since obj != null effectively means "obj exists", the meaning of the whole expression does not involve any negation and is therefore easy to understand.

The same reasoning applies to num != 0 expressions, especially when using bit masks.

These forms have the added benefit of mentioning the interesting case first. In most cases, the value for the == null branch is null itself, like in the following examples: