Jul 30 2026

V2659. MISRA. Switch statements should be well-formed.

Jul 30 2026

This diagnostic rule is based on the MISRA (Motor Industry Software Reliability Association) software development guidelines.

The switch construct in C has fairly flexible syntax. A lack of strict rules can result in the creation of complex, unstructured code. To minimize errors and simplify code maintenance, MISRA introduces the concept of a "well-formed" switch.

To explain what "well-formed" means, we will introduce two more definitions:

1. case-group is a sequence of one or more consecutive case labels (which may include default), for example:

case 42:
// or
case 1: case 2: case 300:
// or
case 12:
default:

2. switch-clause is one of the following:

statement* break;.
C90: { declaration* statement* break; }.
C99 and later: { (declaration | statement)* break; }.
C++: (declaration | statement)* termination-statement.

Where * means repeat 0 or more times.

Note. MISRA C++ threats declarations to be executable statements, so declarations following a case label do not need to be enclosed in a {...} block. Each branch must terminate with a termination statement: break, return, throw, continue, goto, or the [[fallthrough]] attribute.

The example:

x = 5; y = 19; printf("%d", x); break;
// or
{ int x; int y; x = 5; y = x + 1; printf("%d", x); break; }
// or (except C90)
{ int x; x = 5; int y = x + 1; printf("%d", x); break; }

Considering the introduced definitions, a "well-formed" switch can look as follows:

switch (expression)
{
case-group_1:
  switch-clause
case-group_2:
  switch-clause
....
case-group_n:
  switch-clause
}

There are two additional requirements:

The default label must appear either at the beginning of the first case-group or at the end of the last one.
There must be at least two case-groups.

The example N1. Erroneous switch statement:

switch (n)
{
case 1:
default:                            // <= (1)
case 2: n++; int x = 0; x++; break; // <= (2)
case 3: { n++; break; }
}

The example N1 contains the following issues:

the default label's position is incorrect: it must either be the first or the last label in the list;
switch-clause is incorrect after case 2: it contains a declaration that is outside the block.

The example N2. Erroneous switch statement:

switch (n) 
{
case 10:
case 20: break;
}

The example N2 contains the following issues:

the default label is missing;
since the second case label is included in the first one, the number of case-groups is less than two. In this case, switch-case is redundant.

The example N3. Erroneous switch statement.

switch (count % 4) 
{
  case 0: do { *to = *from++;
  case 3:      *to = *from++;
  case 2:      *to = *from++;
  case 1:      *to = *from++;
             } while (--n > 0);
}

The example N3 (Duff's device) contains the following issues:

the incorrect switch-clause: break is missing;
the incorrect case-group: the case 3, case 2, and case 1 labels are inside the switch-clause and form a case-group sequence that is not directly inside the switch-case;
the default label is missing.

Example N4. Well-formed switch statement:

switch (n) 
{
  case 1: case 2: { n = 5; } break;
  case 10: 
  case 20: break;
  case 30: { int x; x = 4; printf("%d", x); break; }
  default: if (n > 6) { n++; } break; 
}

This diagnostic rule is classified as: