You may also understand the difference between null and an empty string this way:
Original image by R. Sato (@raysato)
Answer from mikiqex on Stack OverflowYou may also understand the difference between null and an empty string this way:
Original image by R. Sato (@raysato)
"" is an actual string, albeit an empty one.
null, however, means that the String variable points to nothing.
a==b returns false because "" and null do not occupy the same space in memory--in other words, their variables don't point to the same objects.
a.equals(b) returns false because "" does not equal null, obviously.
The difference is though that since "" is an actual string, you can still invoke methods or functions on it like
a.length()
a.substring(0, 1)
and so on.
If the String equals null, like b, Java would throw a NullPointerException if you tried invoking, say:
b.length()
If the difference you are wondering about is == versus equals, it's this:
== compares references, like if I went
String a = new String("");
String b = new String("");
System.out.println(a==b);
That would output false because I allocated two different objects, and a and b point to different objects.
However, a.equals(b) in this case would return true, because equals for Strings will return true if and only if the argument String is not null and represents the same sequence of characters.
Be warned, though, that Java does have a special case for Strings.
String a = "abc";
String b = "abc";
System.out.println(a==b);
You would think that the output would be false, since it should allocate two different Strings. Actually, Java will intern literal Strings (ones that are initialized like a and b in our example). So be careful, because that can give some false positives on how == works.
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String s1 = ""; means that the empty String is assigned to s1.
In this case, s1.length() is the same as "".length(), which will yield 0 as expected.
String s2 = null; means that (null) or "no value at all" is assigned to s2. So this one, s2.length() is the same as null.length(), which will yield a NullPointerException as you can't call methods on null variables (pointers, sort of) in Java.
Also, a point, the statement
String s1;
Actually has the same effect as:
String s1 = null;
Whereas
String s1 = "";
Is, as said, a different thing.
Null means nothing. Its just a literal. Null is the value of reference variable. But empty string is blank.It gives the length=0. Empty string is a blank value,means the string does not have any thing.
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 */ }
You can leverage Apache Commons StringUtils.isEmpty(str), which checks for empty strings and handles null gracefully.
Example:
System.out.println(StringUtils.isEmpty("")); // true
System.out.println(StringUtils.isEmpty(null)); // true
Google Guava also provides a similar, probably easier-to-read method: Strings.isNullOrEmpty(str).
Example:
System.out.println(Strings.isNullOrEmpty("")); // true
System.out.println(Strings.isNullOrEmpty(null)); // true
First let's clarify something: You mention that after assigning null to the variable you could forget to initialize it, but by assigning null to it you are in effect initializing it.
public static void main (String args[]){
String s;
System.out.println(s); // compiler error variable may not be initialized
}
vs
public static void main (String args[]){
String s=null;
System.out.println(s); // no compiler error
System.out.println(s.equals("helo")); // but this will generate an exception
}
So after you do String s=null; there's is no way that you could forget to initialize because you did initialize it.
That being clear, I would recommend you to use a "smart default". In your case perhaps the empty string "" would be a good default value if you want to avoid NullPointerException. In the other hand, sometimes it is desirable that the program produce an exception because it indicates something wrong happened under the hood that should not have happened.
In general you want to keep declaration and initialisation as close as possible to minimise exactly the type of problem you're talking about.
There is also the issue of redundant initialisation where the value null you're assigning is never used which is extra code that harms readability even if the redundant assignment is optimised away by the compiler.
Sometimes assigning some sort of default value is unavoidable, for example if you declare before a try catch, initialise inside and use it afterwards. For other types you can often find a more natural default value such as an empty list.
I was using IntelliJ and it said that a string needed to be initialized in order for the program to work. It suggests I initialize it this way
String example = null;
instead of
String example = "";
Do you agree with this? I've found conflicting information as to whether or not this is a good idea.
I'm providing some basic database training to some colleagues who are new to the topic. They're having difficulty understanding the difference between NULL and an empty string and I'm not doing a very good job of explaining it! Does anybody know a good way to explain it to beginners, specifically in a database context?
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 ) )
Use org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils
I like to use Apache commons-lang for these kinds of things, and especially the StringUtils utility class:
import org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils;
if (StringUtils.isNotBlank(str)) {
...
}
if (StringUtils.isBlank(str)) {
...
}