Comparing Constants Safely

When comparing two objects, the equals method is used to return true if they are identical. Typically, this leads to the following code :

if (name.equals("Jim")) {
}

The problem here is that whether intended or not, it is quite possible that the name value is null, in which case a null pointer exception would be thrown. A better practice is to execute the equals method of the string constant “Jim” instead :

if ("Jim".equals(name)) {
}

Since the constant is never null, a null exception will not be thrown, and if the other value is null, the equals comparison will fail.

If you are using Java 7 or above, the new Objects class has an equals static method to compare two objects while taking null values into account.

if (Objects.equals(name,"Jim")) {
}

Alternatively if you are using a java version prior to Java 7, but using the guava library you can use the Objects class which has a static equal() method that takes two objects and handles null cases for you. It should also be noted that there are probably a number of other implementations in various libraries (i.e. Apache Commons)