| Title | A format string checker for Java |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2014 |
| Authors | Weitz K, Kim G, Srisakaokul S, Ernst MD |
| Conference Name | ISSTA 2014, Proceedings of the 2014 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis |
| Pagination | 441–444 |
| Date or Month Published | July |
| Conference Location | San Jose, CA, USA |
| Abstract | Java supports format strings, but their use is error prone because: Java's type system does not find any but the most trivial mistakes, Java's format methods fail silently, and format methods are often executed infrequently. \par This paper presents the Format String Checker that is based on the format string type system presented in [WeitzKSE2014]. The Format String Checker guarantees that calls to Java's Formatter API will not throw exceptions. \par We evaluate the Format String Checker on 6 large and well-maintained open-source projects. Format string bugs are common in practice (we found 104 bugs), and the annotation burden on the user of our type system is low (on average, for every bug found, only 1.0 annotations need to be written). |
| Citation Key | WeitzKSE2014:demo |
