[jdom-interest] getText() returns null or ""

[bob]

Hmmm..

At least in my usage of JDOM, I just like to use the text, whatever-it-may-be,
and not worry about testing against equals("").  I'm mostly doing transformations,
though, and not looking at an element and determining if it has text content
or not.  I just use what's there (and "" is perfectly valid).

If it's truly a concern, performance-wise, an implementation could provide
a hasTextContext() method, checking against an internally stored null,
while getText() returns "" if !hasTextContent().  Encapusate the
test-against-null in the Element, while still allowing the empty
string to be returned for those of us who just expect a String
containing the characters (if any) in the element.

	-bob

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Laurent Bihanic wrote:

> 
> On the performance side, a test against null is much faster than an equals()
> on strings.
> 
> Laurent
> 
> Brett McLaughlin wrote:
> > 
> > Folks-
> > 
> > What's the deal with getText() returning null when it has no value?
> > That's what the docs say, and I guess that one just slipped by me (I've
> > been really busy lately ;-) ). In any case, that doesn't seem right -
> > wouldn't it be better to return ""? Is there any functional difference
> > between "" and null? It seems that returning null could cause
> > NullPointerExceptions, while "" always insures you can compare Strings.
> > 
> > Thoughts? I'd like to suggest changing to returning the empty String
> > when there's no value.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Brett
> > --
> > Brett McLaughlin, Enhydra Strategist
> > Lutris Technologies, Inc.
> > 1200 Pacific Avenue, Suite 300
> > Santa Cruz, CA 95060 USA
> > http://www.lutris.com
> > http://www.enhydra.org
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