Replacement operation has no effect

Reports calls to the String methods replace(), replaceAll() or replaceFirst() that have no effect. Such calls can be guaranteed to have no effect when the qualifier and search string are compile-time constants and the search string is not found in the qualifier. This is redundant and may indicate an error.

Example:

  // replacement does nothing
  "hello".replace("$value$", value);

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.

ReplaceOnLiteralHasNoEffect

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 | Java | Verbose or redundant code constructs

Inspection ID: ReplaceOnLiteralHasNoEffect

New in 2022.1

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 ReplaceOnLiteralHasNoEffect

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

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3, Qodana for JVM 2025.3,

Last modified: 03 December 2025