Inspectopedia 2025.2 Help

Pointless boolean expression

Reports unnecessary or overly complicated boolean expressions.

Such expressions include &&-ing with true, ||-ing with false, equality comparison with a boolean literal, or negation of a boolean literal. Such expressions can be simplified.

Example:

boolean a = !(x && false); boolean b = false || x; boolean c = x != true;

After the quick-fix is applied:

boolean a = true; boolean b = x; boolean c = !x;

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.

PointlessBooleanExpression
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 | Control flow issues

Configure the inspection:

Use the Ignore named constants in determining pointless expressions option to ignore named constants when determining if an expression is pointless.

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Pointless boolean expression inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Ignore named constants in determining pointless expressions

Default value:

Selected

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 PointlessBooleanExpression

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