Question

Here’s the scenario…

if (entry.Properties['something'].Value != null)   attribs.something = entry.Properties['something'].Value.ToString(); 

While effective and working correctly, this looks ugly to me. If I don’t check for a null before performing the ToString() then it throws an exception if the property was null. Is there a better way to handle this scenario?

Much appreciated!

Answer 1

Update 8 years later (wow!) to cover c# 6’s null-conditional operator:

var value = maybeNull?.ToString() ?? String.Empty; 

Other approaches:

object defaultValue = 'default'; attribs.something = (entry.Properties['something'].Value ?? defaultValue).ToString() 

I’ve also used this, which isn’t terribly clever but convenient:

public static string ToSafeString(this object obj) {     return (obj ?? string.Empty).ToString(); }