Best way to verify string is empty or null

Question

i am sure this must have been asked before in different ways - as isEmptyOrNull is so common yet people implement it differently. but i have below curious query in terms of

Answer 1

springframework library Check whether the given String is empty.

f(StringUtils.isEmpty(str)) {
    //.... String is blank or null
}

Answer 2

Apache Commons Lang has StringUtils.isEmpty(String str) method which returns true if argument is empty or null

Answer 3

Simply and clearly:

if (str == null || str.trim().length() == 0) {
    // str is empty
}

Answer 4

This one from Google Guava could check out "null and empty String" in the same time.

Strings.isNullOrEmpty("Your string.");

Add a dependency with Maven

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.google.guava</groupId>
  <artifactId>guava</artifactId>
  <version>20.0</version>
</dependency>

with Gradle

dependencies {
  compile 'com.google.guava:guava:20.0'
}

Answer 5

If you have to test more than one string in the same validation, you can do something like this:

import java.util.Optional;
import java.util.function.Predicate;
import java.util.stream.Stream;

public class StringHelper {

  public static Boolean hasBlank(String ... strings) {

    Predicate<String> isBlank = s -> s == null || s.trim().isEmpty();

    return Optional
      .ofNullable(strings)
      .map(Stream::of)
      .map(stream -> stream.anyMatch(isBlank))
      .orElse(false);
  }

}

So, you can use this like StringHelper.hasBlank("Hello", null, "", " ") or StringHelper.hasBlank("Hello") in a generic form.

Answer 6

You can make use of Optional and Apache commons Stringutils library

Optional.ofNullable(StringUtils.noEmpty(string1)).orElse(string2);

here it will check if the string1 is not null and not empty else it will return string2