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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LANG-360?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#action_12540224
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Paul Benedict commented on LANG-360:
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Stephen says: "This method is meant to simulate the identity toString". Based
on his words, I concur that passing a null object should throw an exception.
Thus I recommend:
(1) return void to get rid of method chaining
(2) throw an exception is StringBuffer is null
(3) throw an exception if Object is null
#3 makes most sense. There is no identity to a null object.
> Why does appendIdentityToString return null?
> --------------------------------------------
>
> Key: LANG-360
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LANG-360
> Project: Commons Lang
> Issue Type: Bug
> Reporter: Jörg Gottschling
> Fix For: 2.4
>
> Attachments: LANG-360.patch
>
>
> ObjectUtils is designed to handle null imputs gracefully. But
> ObjectUtils.appendIdentityToString does not. It returns null unnessecary if
> you pass null als second parameter (the object to get the identity from). For
> example appendIdentityToString(new StringBuffer(), null) will return null!
> Which is an uncommen behaviour. Think about code like this:
> ObjectUtils.appendIdentityToString(buffer, param1)
> .appendIdentityToString(buffer, param2)
> .appendIdentityToString(buffer, param3);
> This will cause an NPE if param1 or param2 ist null. There may be other code
> where a NPE will not happen, but the code is used for debugging and there
> will be an unexpected or wrong output.
> So you shoul return the StringBuffer which is passed in or a new one if null.
> The harder question is what to do with the object. I think we should append
> "null" to the StringBuffer, because this is what I would expect and what the
> passed reference is.
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