Our website uses cookies to enhance your browsing experience.
Accept
to the top
close form

Fill out the form in 2 simple steps below:

Your contact information:

Step 1
Congratulations! This is your promo code!

Desired license type:

Step 2
Team license
Enterprise license
** By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement
close form
Request our prices
New License
License Renewal
--Select currency--
USD
EUR
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
Free PVS‑Studio license for Microsoft MVP specialists
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
To get the licence for your open-source project, please fill out this form
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
I am interested to try it on the platforms:
* By clicking this button you agree to our Privacy Policy statement

close form
check circle
Message submitted.

Your message has been sent. We will email you at


If you do not see the email in your inbox, please check if it is filtered to one of the following folders:

  • Promotion
  • Updates
  • Spam

Webinar: Evaluation - 05.12

>
>
>
V706. Suspicious division: sizeof(X) / …
menu mobile close menu
Analyzer diagnostics
General Analysis (C++)
General Analysis (C#)
General Analysis (Java)
Micro-Optimizations (C++)
Diagnosis of 64-bit errors (Viva64, C++)
Customer specific requests (C++)
MISRA errors
AUTOSAR errors
OWASP errors (C++)
OWASP errors (C#)
Problems related to code analyzer
Additional information
toggle menu Contents

V706. Suspicious division: sizeof(X) / Value. Size of every element in X array is not equal to divisor.

Nov 11 2014

The analyzer has detected a suspicious division of one sizeof() operator's result by another sizeof() operator or number, sizeof() being applied to an array and the item size not coinciding with the divisor. The code is very likely to contain an error.

An example:

size_t A[10];
n = sizeof(A) / sizeof(unsigned);

In the 32-bit build mode, the sizes of the types unsigned and size_t coincide and 'n' will equal ten. In the 64-bit build mode, however, the size of the size_t type is 8 bytes while that of the unsigned type is just 4 bytes. As a result, the n variable will equal 20, which is hardly what the programmer wanted.

Code like the following one will also be considered incorrect:

size_t A[9];
n = sizeof(A) / 7;

In the 32-bit mode, the array's size is 4 * 9 = 36 bytes. Dividing 36 by 7 is very strange. So what did the programmer actually want to do? Something is obviously wrong with this code.

No concrete recommendations can be given on how to deal with issues like that because each particular case needs to be approached individually as reasons may vary: a type size might have been changed or an array size defined incorrectly, and so on. This error often results from typos or simply inattention.

The analyzer won't generate this warning if the array is of the char or uchar type since such arrays are often used as buffers to store some data of other types. The following is an example of code the analyzer treats as safe:

char A[9];
n = sizeof(A) / 3;

This diagnostic is classified as:

You can look at examples of errors detected by the V706 diagnostic.