Question

I am passing an accountid as input from an XML file as shown, which will be parsed later and will be used in our code:

<accountid>123456</accountid>
<user>pavan</user>

The issue is that if nothing is passed (null value in accoutnid) is passed as accountid, I could not able to handle that situation in Java code. I tried this but I was not successful:

if (acct != null||acct==""||acct.equals("")) 
{
    // the above is not working 
}

I was able to handle this successfully using the following approach:

if(!acct.isEmpty())
{
   // thisis working 
}

Can we rely on the String.isEmpty() method for checking the null condition of a String? Is this valid?

Answer 1

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))