Question

Sometimes, or well, pretty often i need to see if a String is null or isn’t, so i use a conditional like this:

if(str != null) {
}

It worked fine until this day, now even strings that are null pass for some reason which I don’t get. Does anyone that knows an explanation? or a solution?

Edit:
OK, so for some reason the string doesn’t seem to be null, which is very odd since i never defined what it was, only denfined that it existed. So instead the string was a string of the word “null”. Which i have totally no idea why it would be? When i do following:

String str;

then it’s automatically null, right? And either way if it’s not why would it become the string “null”?

Answer 1

I would check for length as well after checking for null:

if(stringVar == null || stringVar.length() == 0) { /* DO STUFF */ }

To make life easier you can make a extension method:

public static boolean notEmpty(String s) 
{ 
return (s != null && s.length() > 0);
}