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Message:

Gotcha

Posted by Matt Gerrans on October 31, 2001 at 12:38 PM

> I think Matt has summed it up very nicely. One other thing that I have noticed once or twice in my Java development career is code along the lines of:-

> String myString = "" + someArbitaryObject.getArbitaryValue();

> If the method getArbitaryValue() returns a null, you will get a string object created with the value "null". This has caused me hours of fun trying to debug code like this in the past, so it's worth watching out for.

Maybe you could avoid that problem by doing it this way:

String myString = someArbitaryObject.getArbitaryValue().toString();

Except for primatives, where the various purmutations of (new Integer(i)).toString() is a lot more tedious than ("" + i), this trick is not nearly as necessary in Java as in JavaScript, where there is no other option (or maybe there is, but I never found it).

- mfg

• String gotcha... Alan Weeks November 02, 2001 at 6:10 PM (1)
  • Stringing things along Matt Gerrans November 03, 2001 at 12:53 PM (0)