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Unused local variable

Reports the variables that are considered unused in the following cases:

  • The value of the variable is not used anywhere or is overwritten immediately.

  • The reference stored in the variable is not used anywhere or is overwritten immediately.

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.

PhpUnusedLocalVariableInspection
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 | PHP | Unused symbols

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Unused local variable inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Enable inspection in global space

Default value:

Not selected
Ignore a foreach value inside 'list()' or when a 'foreach' key exists

Default value:

Selected
Ignore variables inside 'list()'

Default value:

Not selected
Ignore assignment to 'null'

Default value:

Selected
Ignore variables accessed via 'get_defined_vars()'

Default value:

Selected
Ignore variables before 'include'

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 PhpUnusedLocalVariableInspection

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Last modified: 18 September 2025