String Initialization

[James Gordon]

Hi,
I am just wondering which is the proper/recommended way to initialize a String variable.
String str = "" or
String str = null

Thanks in advance.

[Barry Gaunt]

String str = ""; // in this case str references a String instance, albeit an empty string instance.
String str = null; // str does not refer to a String instance.
In my opinion the former is more "correct" than the latter. But it all depends on the conventions agreed upon by the rest of your program.
-Barry
[ September 29, 2002: Message edited by: Barry Gaunt ]

[Wilfried LAURENT]

In my opinion, it is useless to declare a String as
String str="";
What you are doing is allocating a useless String object. Strings are immutable objects. So what will happen next is that you will recreate another String while writing
str="Toto". The use of "" is however optimized since it belongs to the String pool.
If you need to know if your String has been allocated before then a simple test (str==null) is better than str.equals("") (the latter being worse worse than str.length()==0).
W.

[Barry Gaunt]

So, James, take your pick. I do like my references pointing somewhere, though.
-Barry

[Chris Stewart]

I prefer to write it this way...

String str = null;