Initialize a string variable in Python: “” or None?

Question

Suppose I have a class with a string instance attribute. Should I initialize this attribute with \"\" value or None? Is either

Answer 1

None is used to indicate "not set", whereas any other value is used to indicate a "default" value.

Hence, if your class copes with empty strings and you like it as a default value, use "". If your class needs to check if the variable was set at all, use None.

Notice that it doesn't matter if your variable is a string initially. You can change it to any other type/value at any other moment.

Answer 2

Either might be fine, but I don't think there is a definite answer.

• If you want to indicate that the value has not been set, comparing with None is better than comparing with "", since "" might be a valid value,
• If you just want a default value, "" is probably better, because its actually a string, and you can call string methods on it. If you went with None, these would lead to exceptions.
• If you wish to indicate to future maintainers that a string is required here, "" can help with that.

Complete side note:

If you have a loop, say:

def myfunc (self, mystr = ""):
    for other in self.strs:
        mystr = self.otherfunc (mystr, other)

then a potential future optimizer would know that str is always a string. If you used None, then it might not be a string until the first iteration, which would require loop unrolling to get the same effects. While this isn't a hypothetical (it comes up a lot in my PHP compiler) you should certainly never write your code to take this into account. I just thought it might be interesting :)

Answer 3

empty_string = ""

if not empty_string:

    print "Empty string is not set"

=>Empty string is not set

if empty_string is not None:
    print "Empty string is not None"

=>Empty string is not None

Answer 4

Either is fine, though None is more common as a convention - None indicates that no value was passed for the optional parameter.

There will be times when "" is the correct default value to use - in my experience, those times occur less often.

Answer 5

It depends. If you want to distinguish between no parameter passed in at all, and an empty string passed in, you could use None.

Answer 6

Another way to initialize an empty string is by using the built-in str() function with no arguments.

str(object='')

Return a string containing a nicely printable representation of an object.

...

If no argument is given, returns the empty string, ''.

In the original example, that would look like this:

def __init__(self, mystr=str())
   self.mystr = mystr

Personally, I believe that this better conveys your intentions.

Notice by the way that str() itself sets a default parameter value of ''.