Never return Null Arrays!

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Tag: null

Never return Null Arrays!

October 15th, 2008 by Scott Selikoff

Continuing on Jeanne’s theme of nulls, its a pet peeve of mine when I come across code that returns null arrays instead of empty arrays. The purpose of this post is to discuss some of the reasons why its a good practice to return empty arrays over null arrays, including Collection objects or typed array. [...]

null checking in the extreme

October 13th, 2008 by Jeanne Boyarsky

In Java, we’re told to check for nulls to avoid unexpected null pointer exceptions.  This can be taken too far though.  Consider the following code: StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(): if ( builder != null ) { builder.append("data"); } When did builder have the opportunity to become null? By definition, a constructor creates an object. [...]