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??-????-2020 - 6.27.0-SNAPSHOT

The PMD team is pleased to announce PMD 6.27.0-SNAPSHOT.

This is a minor release.

New and noteworthy

Changes in how tab characters are handled

In the past, tab characters in source files has been handled differently in different languages by PMD. For instance in Java, tab characters had a width of 8 columns, while C# used only 1 column. Visualforce instead used 4 columns.

This has been unified now so that tab characters are consistently now always 1 column wide.

This however might be a incompatible change, if you’re using the properties “BeginColumn” or “EndColumn” additionally to “BeginLine” and “EndLine” of a Token/AST node in order to highlight where a rule violation occurred in the source file. If you have logic there that deals with tab characters, you most likely can remove this logic now, since tab characters are now just “normal” characters in terms of string processing.

See also [all] Ensure PMD/CPD uses tab width of 1 for tabs consistently #2656.

New Rules

  • The new Java rule AvoidReassigningCatchVariables (java-bestpractices) finds cases where the variable of the caught exception is reassigned. This practice is surprising and prevents further evolution of the code like multi-catch.

Deprecated Rules

Fixed Issues

  • core
    • #724: [core] Avoid parsing rulesets multiple times
    • #1962: [core] Simplify Report API
    • #2653: [lang-test] Upgrade kotlintest to Kotest
    • #2656: [all] Ensure PMD/CPD uses tab width of 1 for tabs consistently
    • #2690: [core] Fix java7 compatibility
  • java-bestpractices
    • #2471: [java] New Rule: AvoidReassigningCatchVariables
    • #2668: [java] UnusedAssignment false positives
    • #2684: [java] UnusedAssignment FP in try/catch
    • #2686: [java] UnusedAssignment must not flag abstract method parameters in interfaces and abstract classes
  • java-errorprone
    • #2431: [java] InvalidLogMessageFormatRule throws IndexOutOfBoundsException when only logging exception message
    • #2439: [java] AvoidCatchingThrowable can not detect the case: catch (java.lang.Throwable t)
    • #2531: [java] UnnecessaryCaseChange can not detect the case like: foo.equals(bar.toLowerCase())
    • #2647: [java] Deprecate rule DataFlowAnomalyAnalysis
  • java-performance
    • #2441: [java] RedundantFieldInitializer can not detect a special case for char initialize: char foo = '\0';
    • #2530: [java] StringToString can not detect the case: getStringMethod().toString()

API Changes

  • XML rule definition in rulesets: In PMD 7, the language attribute will be required on all rule elements that declare a new rule. Some base rule classes set the language implicitly in their constructor, and so this is not required in all cases for the rule to work. But this behavior will be discontinued in PMD 7, so missing language attributes are now reported as a forward compatibility warning.

Deprecated API

For removal

External Contributions