Java tip of the day - a must for newbies (are you reading this, Steve?), and a valuable reminder to the experienced: Kasia's The abuse and over-use of toString().
I was working on other people's code last week, and I wish they had read this! The debug code was using toString() all over the place, and NullPointerExceptions were frequent.
To sum up, the rules with toString() are: always override it, and never call it (directly). Instead, use String.valueOf() at all times.
Via Erik.
Posted to Java by Simon Brunning at July 14, 2003 10:55 AMHaven't got this far in the book yet but it makes sense to me which must be a good thing. Now all I have to do is remember it.
Posted by: Stevan Rose on July 14, 2003 12:06 PMMe too - hence the post!
Posted by: Simon Brunning on July 14, 2003 12:09 PMBTW, Kasia points out that String.valueOf() is used *implicitly* whenever objects are coerced to strings. But given that the whole idea here is to bulletproof code, I'd prefer *not* to rely on this implicit behaviour, and to call String.valueOf() explicitly. YMMV.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on July 14, 2003 12:16 PMOK, Simon. Following your logic, I shouldn't depend on new to allocate memory for me, I should call the OS directly to allocate memory to make sure my code is bulletproof.
Is that right?
I *don't* like implicit coersions. A metter of taste, perhaps. Or are you talking about something other than calling String.valueOf() explicitly?
Posted by: Simon Brunning on July 14, 2003 04:43 PMand if you are concating strings with
"Fate"+"is"+"Golem"
especially in J2ME you should be taken out back and shot!
Fred - Isn't that a myth now?
I was sure most of the compilers magiked that away by now.
Posted by: Daniel Sheppard on July 15, 2003 02:30 AMNote that I'm only advocating not using toString() - not avoiding non-static methods altogether! Nor am I suggesting that you should avoid explicit checks for null in general.
toString() is a special case, as far as I'm concerned, 'cos it's almost exclusivly used in exception handling and logging code, which should not fail under *any* curcumstances. Yes, if you have a null where you shouldn't, something has gone wrong and your program is almost certainly going to fail Real Soon Now. But you *need* your logging and exception handling code to work to help you work out what is going on...
See http://www.freeroller.net/page/ceperez/20030714#non_static_method_calls_considered and its comments for more on this.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on July 15, 2003 10:44 AMIt seems really naive to blame the *caller* of toString() when it's the stupid author of the underlying class who did the wrong thing. If you can't trust toString() to work correctly, 100% of the time, you're better off choosing someone else's implementation of whatever functionality you are trying to use.
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