S2259 False Positive "Null pointers should not be dereferenced"

  • SonarLint version 6.7.0.52071
  • Visual Studio 2019
  • C# code targeting .NET Core 3.1.

The warning is triggered on a line immediately after the necessary null checks have already been performed. This is likely due to the tool not seeing a direct case where I check that the variable is not null, even though the preceding combined null checks all overlap to cover that case. I have attached a minimal project that shows this behavior.

SonarLint S2259 False Positive Replication VS 2019 Solution.zip (15.1 KB)

Thanks for providing a complete solution. I’ve copied the .cs code here for simplicity.

namespace SonarLint_S2259_False_Positive_Replication
{
	public class FPReplication
	{
		public int PartialChecksForSemanticVersionComparison(string PreRelease, string OtherPreRelease)
		{
			if (PreRelease == OtherPreRelease) { return 0; }
			if (PreRelease != null && OtherPreRelease == null) { return -1; }
			if (PreRelease == null && OtherPreRelease != null) { return 1; }

			_ = PreRelease.Split('.'); //S2259 false positive on this line, where it doesn't see that lines 9 and 11 overlap to protect against System.NullReferenceException
			_ = OtherPreRelease.Split('.');

			return 0;
		}
	}
}

Short correction here. I called out the line numbers 9 and 11, but deleted an unused using section a the top of the file right before saving and zipping up the project. I’m meaning to point out the first and third if statements on lines 7 and 9.

Interestingly, only the first split call seems to trigger S2259. I just noticed that the second call is covered by the same checks but doesn’t trigger the warning.

Hello @marshall

Thank you for reporting this. We will add this case to our test suite here FP S2259: Reproducer: Null check with two variables by martin-strecker-sonarsource · Pull Request #6025 · SonarSource/sonar-dotnet · GitHub
We are working on that rule at the moment and your case should be covered in one of the next releases.

Best, Martin

Excellent, thanks!

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