Is making an empty string constant worth it?

Question

I have a co-worker that swears by

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

in a constants class

Answer 1

I'm with your coworker. While the empty string is hard to mistype, you can accidentally put a space in there and it may be difficult to notice when scanning the code. More to the point it is a good practice to do this with all of your string constants that get used in more than one place -- although, I tend to do this at the class level rather than as global constants.

FWIW, C# has a static property string.Empty for just this purpose and I find that it improves the readability of the code immensely.