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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T11:58:40+00:00

Does the order of operands in a Boolean affect the order of evaluation? As

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Does the order of operands in a Boolean affect the order of evaluation? As an example can I rely on 

String s = ...;
if (s != null && s.length() > 10) ...

I seem to remember that the Java language does not define order of evaluation and that a null value of s could cause a NPE. Is this still true (a) in principle and (b) in practice with the common Java implementations?

UPDATE:
I couldn’t find the exact duplicate. It’s interesting to see the differences of opinions in the answers and get a downvote for it – ah well!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, it does matter and

    … the Java language does not define order of evaluation

    is not true. The arguments are evaluated from left to right, so an expression like s != null && s.length() > 10 will never throw a NullPointerException.

    See 15.7 Expressions – Evaluation Order in the Java Language Specification.

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