What methods should go into a java.util.Objects class in JDK 7? (original) (raw)

David Holmes - Sun Microsystems David.Holmes at Sun.COM
Wed Oct 7 04:56:35 UTC 2009

Paul,

Paul Benedict said the following on 10/07/09 14:44:

If you want Objects.toString() to provide value, consider mimicking the functionality from Apache Commons:

http://commons.apache.org/lang/api-2.4/org/apache/commons/lang/ObjectUtils.html My biggest complaint about String.valueOf(Object) is that it will actually return "null" for null objects. I can't stand that. If I have no data, I don't want any printable data back. While my preference might be too narrow for the JDK, the second overloaded version of ObjectUtils#toString(String, String) seems like a winner to me. Allow a default String to be provided when it is null:

I can see this might be useful ...

public static String toString(Object o, String defaultStr) { return (o != null) ? : String.valueOf(o) : defaultStr; }

but the implementation would just need to be:

   return o != null ? o.toString() : defaultStr;

Cheers, David

Paul

More information about the core-libs-dev mailing list