The rule is broken and marks as code smell, variable definitions that are clearly used a couple lines below. Sample code that shows issues: val usedVariable = someRandomFunction() ?: throw someException.badRequest("Message") anotherClass.validPublicMethod(usedVariable, something.weDontCareAbout()) …

Quick update: the issue has been fixed at the end of 2021 and is deployed on SonarCloud. If you find any other false positives please report them in a new thread, I am going to close this one.

Hello George, Thanks for your report. I was not able to reproduce the false positive based on the code you provided. Do you have a complete reproducer available or is the project in which you have observed this behavior public?

Hey Johann, This is a private project, so I’d be happy to send it to you privately if you open up a conversation. Best, George

Hello George, This particular rule uses the Kotlin compiler diagnostics directly and doesn’t actually perform an additional analysis itself. It looks like the compiler may not be able to resolve everything correctly. Could you please check which values you have set for sonar.java.binaries and sonar…

I’m seeing something similar in SonarLint in Android Studio, but not in the analysis from SonarQube. The code getting flagged by SonarLint is: fun someMethodThatRequiresActivity() { val activity = activity ?: return ... activity.doSomethingWithIt() } … where “activity” is an optional (…

We strongly recommend against not configuring these parameters properly, as Alexandre has already indicated in the other thread. The quality of the results will most certainly degrade. If you really want to go down this road (again: we heavily recommend against this!), you can check if you have set…

That makes sense. Though I’m curious, isn’t this more a syntactic issue than semantic to be resolved by libraries?

I agree with you that there is definitely room for improvement here and that some situations could be detected with higher precision, even if semantics are unavailable. I’ve created a ticket to track these FPs. Please be aware that tackling this issue is currently not the highest priority, so I cann…

'Unused local variables should be removed' rule is BROKEN

SonarQube Cloud

geojakes (George Jacob) September 29, 2021, 6:53pm 7

Sorry about the delay. We’ve setup those parameters as mentioned by Alexandre here to save on time. Kolin project scan times dramatically increased today! Why? - #9 by geojakes

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SonarLint IntelliJ plugin for Kotlin doesn't detect an unused variable IntelliJ Platform kotlin , intellij , bug-no-category	2	1716	November 28, 2018
False positive: kotlin:S1481 SonarQube Server / Community Build kotlin , false-positive	1	42	March 27, 2026
"Unused local variables should be removed" is broken IntelliJ Platform kotlin	6	1380	December 26, 2022
Kotlin false positive -- unused local variable in with block SonarQube Cloud kotlin , sonarqube-cloud	4	1070	November 8, 2021
kotlin:S1481 false-positive unused variable when assigned to hashmap Report False-positive / False-negative... kotlin , sonarqube	5	1062	July 31, 2023

'Unused local variables should be removed' rule is BROKEN

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