Non-short-circuit boolean expression

Reports usages of the non-short-circuit forms of boolean 'and' and 'or' (&, |, &= and |=). Although the non-short-circuit versions are occasionally useful, in most cases the short-circuit forms (&& and ||) are intended and such unintentional usages may lead to subtle bugs.

A quick-fix is suggested to use the short-circuit versions.

Example:

  void foo(boolean x, boolean y, boolean z) {
    if (x | y) { x |= z; }
  }

After the quick-fix is applied:

  void foo(boolean x, boolean y) {
    if (x || y) { x = x || z; }
  }

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

NonShortCircuitBooleanExpression

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | Java | Probable bugs

Inspection ID: NonShortCircuitBoolean

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection NonShortCircuitBooleanExpression

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3, Qodana for JVM 2025.3,

Last modified: 03 December 2025