The main benefit of "".equals(s) is you don't need the null check (equals will check its argument and return false if it's null), which you seem to not care about. If you're not worried about s being null (or are otherwise checking for it), I would definitely use s.isEmpty(); it shows exactly what you're checking, you care whether or not s is empty, not whether it equals the empty string

StringUtils.isBlank() checks that each character of the string is a whitespace character (or that the string is empty or that it's null). This is totally different than just checking if the string is empty.

From the linked documentation:

Checks if a String is whitespace, empty ("") or null.

 StringUtils.isBlank(null)      = true
 StringUtils.isBlank("")        = true  
 StringUtils.isBlank(" ")       = true  
 StringUtils.isBlank("bob")     = false  
 StringUtils.isBlank("  bob  ") = false

For comparison StringUtils.isEmpty:

 StringUtils.isEmpty(null)      = true
 StringUtils.isEmpty("")        = true  
 StringUtils.isEmpty(" ")       = false  
 StringUtils.isEmpty("bob")     = false  
 StringUtils.isEmpty("  bob  ") = false

Warning: In java.lang.String.isBlank() and java.lang.String.isEmpty() work the same except they don't return true for null.

java.lang.String.isBlank() (since Java 11)

java.lang.String.isEmpty()

Correct way to check for null or empty or string containing only spaces is like this:

if(str != null && !str.trim().isEmpty()) { /* do your stuffs here */ }

What about isEmpty() ?

if(str != null && !str.isEmpty())

Be sure to use the parts of && in this order, because java will not proceed to evaluate the second part if the first part of && fails, thus ensuring you will not get a null pointer exception from str.isEmpty() if str is null.

Beware, it's only available since Java SE 1.6. You have to check str.length() == 0 on previous versions.

To ignore whitespace as well:

if(str != null && !str.trim().isEmpty())

(since Java 11 str.trim().isEmpty() can be reduced to str.isBlank() which will also test for other Unicode white spaces)

Wrapped in a handy function:

public static boolean empty( final String s ) {
  // Null-safe, short-circuit evaluation.
  return s == null || s.trim().isEmpty();
}

Becomes:

if( !empty( str ) )

I think isEmpty() is a bit more efficient. However a smart compiler may optimize the equals("") call anyway. From the OpenJDK source:

  671     public boolean isEmpty() {
  672         return count == 0;
  673     }

 1013     public boolean equals(Object anObject) {
 1014         if (this == anObject) {
 1015             return true;
 1016         }
 1017         if (anObject instanceof String) {
 1018             String anotherString = (String)anObject;
 1019             int n = count;
 1020             if (n == anotherString.count) {
 1021                 char v1[] = value;
 1022                 char v2[] = anotherString.value;
 1023                 int i = offset;
 1024                 int j = anotherString.offset;
 1025                 while (n-- != 0) {
 1026                     if (v1[i++] != v2[j++])
 1027                         return false;
 1028                 }
 1029                 return true;
 1030             }
 1031         }
 1032         return false;
 1033     }

Also the answer here on whether to use str.isEmpty() or "".equals(str) is spot on:

The main benefit of "".equals(s) is you don't need the null check (equals will check its argument and return false if it's null), which you seem to not care about. If you're not worried about s being null (or are otherwise checking for it), I would definitely use s.isEmpty(); it shows exactly what you're checking, you care whether or not s is empty, not whether it equals the empty string

No, absolutely not - because if acct is null, it won't even get to isEmpty... it will immediately throw a NullPointerException.

Your test should be:

if (acct != null && !acct.isEmpty())

Note the use of && here, rather than your || in the previous code; also note how in your previous code, your conditions were wrong anyway - even with && you would only have entered the if body if acct was an empty string.

Alternatively, using Guava:

if (!Strings.isNullOrEmpty(acct))