Question

I have a co-worker that swears by

//in a singleton 'Constants' class public static final String EMPTY_STRING = ''; 

in a constants class available throughout the project. That way, we can write something like

if (Constants.EMPTY_STRING.equals(otherString)) {     ... } 

instead of

if (''.equals(otherString)) {     ... } 

I say it’s

1. not worth it–it doesn’t save any space in the heap/stack/string pool,
2. ugly
3. abuse of a constants class.

Who is the idiot here?

Answer 1

String literals are interned by default, so no matter how many times you refer to ” in code, there will only be one empty String object. I don’t see any benefit in declaring EMPTY_STRING. Otherwise, you might as well declare ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, etc. for integer literals.

Of course, if you want to change the value of EMPTY_STRING later, it’s handy to have it in one place 😉