Problems when there are too many unused imports

[obeattie]

I'm having some difficulties where this plugin leaves some unused imports "behind" when there are too many.

My use-case is for code generation, where I'm not certain what imports a piece of code will use, so I am putting all possible imports at the top of the file and then using --fix to remove those that are not used. One of the packages I'm using in this way is lucide-react, which exports a lot of different icons as separate components.

However when I do this, it seems to always leave four imports behind. I've come up with a minimal reproduction.

1. Create an empty directory
2. npm init
3. npm i --save react lucide-react
4. npm i --save-dev eslint typescript typescript-eslint eslint-plugin-unused-imports
5. Create the following these two files: https://gist.github.com/obeattie/e3dff83624fc0f01449b8288a45f93fb (unfortunately, they are too long to include in the issue directly)
6. npx eslint --fix ./index.ts

You'll see 4 imports were left "behind". In the output:

/Users/obeattie/src/github.com/lispwoso/unused-import-repro/index.ts
  1:10  error  'ExpandIcon' is defined but never used. Allowed unused vars must match /^_/u           @typescript-eslint/no-unused-vars
  1:10  error  'ExpandIcon' is defined but never used                                                 unused-imports/no-unused-imports
  1:22  error  'LucideClipboardType' is defined but never used. Allowed unused vars must match /^_/u  @typescript-eslint/no-unused-vars
  1:22  error  'LucideClipboardType' is defined but never used                                        unused-imports/no-unused-imports
  1:43  error  'LucideTv2' is defined but never used. Allowed unused vars must match /^_/u            @typescript-eslint/no-unused-vars
  1:43  error  'LucideTv2' is defined but never used                                                  unused-imports/no-unused-imports
  1:54  error  'Strikethrough' is defined but never used. Allowed unused vars must match /^_/u        @typescript-eslint/no-unused-vars
  1:54  error  'Strikethrough' is defined but never used                                              unused-imports/no-unused-imports

✖ 8 problems (8 errors, 0 warnings)
  4 errors and 0 warnings potentially fixable with the `--fix` option.

…and they will remain in the index.ts file, as well:

import { ExpandIcon, LucideClipboardType, LucideTv2, Strikethrough } from "lucide-react";

export default function foo() {
}

If you run npx eslint --fix ./index.ts again, they will be removed.

Not sure why this is happening but would really appreciate some help! 🙏

[sweepline]

Thanks for an excellent bug report. I can reproduce the issue. It seems to be at fixed intervals that it does not remove an import.