Question

I do a middleware call as to get an array of String as shown:

String[] freqwords = MViewer.getWordNames();

The issue is that there might be no data available, so any further operations like freqWords.length, may result in NullPointerException.

So to avoid that I am handling in this below way as shown:

if (freqwords == null)
{
  freqwords = new String[0];
}

The code is working fine – please let me know if there is any better approach or any negative scenarios with this.

Answer 1

If you never need to distinguish the case of String[0] from a null return value (e.g. if null is returned if and only if there is no data available), then this seems like a perfectly reasonable solution.