Question

Often I invoke alien methods which might return a null value. In order to avoid simple null checks like

if (myVariable != null) {
     // do something
}

I sometimes assign a default value, like this:

myVariable = (myVariable == null) ? defaultValue : myVariable;

This seems a little bit redundant in Ruby for instance, there is the ||= operator

I am not asking for such an operator, but my standard approach with the ternary operator seems a little bit redundant or maybe also confusing?

What better ways are there?

Answer 1

Try this:

if (myVariable == null) {
    myVariable = defaultValue;
}