Inspectopedia 2025.2 Help

Confusing argument to varargs method

Reports calls to variable arity methods that have a single argument in the vararg parameter position, which is either a null or an array of a subtype of the vararg parameter. Such an argument may be confusing as it is unclear if a varargs or non-varargs call is desired.

Example:

String[] ss = new String[]{"foo", "bar"}; System.out.printf("%s", ss);

In this example only the first element of the array will be printed, not the entire array.

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.

NullArgumentToVariableArgMethod
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

This inspection depends on the Java feature 'Variable arity methods', which is available since Java 5.

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 NullArgumentToVariableArgMethod

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

Inspection Details

By default bundled with:

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025