Question

Suppose I have String parameter coming from a query string request parameters. As you know the parameter may be missing or may be there but value is empty string.
In groovy language I can simply do something like

  List lst = words?.split(',') 

if words was null, lst would be null instead of throwing NPE

what is similar shortcut in scala?

Option[String] is not an option here as words is of type String as it is coming from query string.

Answer 1

If you want to keep nulls around,

val lst = Option(words).map(_ split ',').orNull

But what you should do is get rid of the nulls. If some API (Java, most likely) may return a null, wrap its call in Option(), to get a proper Option instead. If some API needs to be passed a null, pass it an option.orNull.

Inside your own code, don’t let anything be null.