Repetitive and Oversized Message Output for EXP50-CPP Rule Breaks CSV Export

[Beeram12]

• When running a CodeQL analysis on C++ code, the query for the CERT C++ rule EXP50-CPP (Do not depend on the order of scalar object evaluation for side effects) can produce an extremely large and repetitive message for a single finding.
• This results in a message field that is over 40,000 characters long. When exporting the analysis results to a CSV file, this oversized field makes the file unusable in standard spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc, which have a cell character limit of 32,767.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a CodeQL database for a C++ project that contains violations of the EXP50-CPP rule. (In our case, this was found in the RTEMS codebase in the file cpukit/compression/zlib/deflate.c).
2. Run the database analysis command targeting the cpp/cert query suite or a specific query related to EXP50-CPP.

codeql database analyze <path-to-db> cpp-cert.qls --format=csv --output=results.csv

3. Open the resulting results.csv in a text editor.
4. Observe that the "Message" column for the EXP50-CPP finding is extremely long and contains many repetitive lines.

• This issue was faced by my mentor the cell which he was having issue looks like this

• The database I was using as been attached here

• Also while analysing cert-c queries rules some queires are getting struck after providing enough resources.

[jketema]

Hi @Beeram12,

Thanks for your question. We don't limit the size of out output to make it always immediately digestible by a spreadsheet application. If you need the load the csv into a spreadsheet application, I would strongly recommend you do some preprocessing, with e.g. Python, to enforce the limits your spreadsheet application requires.

It seems that the queries you're referring to are "coding standards" queries. Note that these queries are currently being maintained by a separate team. Questions specifically related to these queries should be directed to https://github.com/github/codeql-coding-standards.