# V715. The 'while' operator has empty body. This pattern is suspicious.

The analyzer has detected a strange code fragment with an unusually placed while operator with an empty body. The 'while' operator is standing after a closing parenthesis associated with the body of an 'if', 'for' or another 'while' operator. Such errors may occur when dealing with complex code with a high nesting level. This diagnostic may sometimes intersect with the V712 diagnostic.

An example from a real-life application:

    while (node != NULL) {
      if ((node->hashCode == code) &&
          (node->entry.key == key)) {
        return true;
      }
      node = node->next;
    } while (node != NULL);

This sample is totally correct from the viewpoint of the C++ language's syntax: the first 'while' loop ends with a closing curly brace and is followed by a second while loop with an empty body. Moreover, the second loop will never become an infinite one as Node will surely be not equal to NULL after leaving the first loop. However, it is obvious that something is wrong with this code. Perhaps the programmer wanted to write a while loop at first but then changed his mind and made a do .... while loop but for some reason didn't change the first condition to do. Or maybe it was the do .... while loop that appeared first and then was replaced with while but only partially. Anyway, there is only one conclusion to draw from this: the code needs reviewing and then rewriting in such a way as to get rid of the meaningless while loop.

If the code is written right as it was supposed to, we recommend that instead of marking it as a false positive you rather move while to the next line in order to explicitly specify that it doesn't refer to the previous block and thus simplify the job of other programmers to maintain the project in future.

This diagnostic is classified as:

CWE-691 CERT-EXP15-C

You can look at examples of errors detected by the V715 diagnostic.