ArrayUtils should have method to conver null arrays to empty ones to help with
Defensive coding
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Key: LANG-534
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LANG-534
Project: Commons Lang
Issue Type: Improvement
Reporter: Levon Karayan
Priority: Trivial
There are APIs that I've come across that return <code>null</code> Arrays in
the event where there are no results. Often these APIs correctly throw
exceptions when there is an "exceptional event", but no results isn't
exceptional. This causes the programmer to make extra tests for null
throughout the code to deal with the null case, and sometimes these null cases
are added after a customer searched for gobleygook and got a
NullPointerException. It's just far cleaner/safer to convert these null arrays
to empty ones.
Another benefit to this method is that if the array being passed in is actually
already an empty array, it will swap the pointer for the <code>static
final</code> in the ArrayUtils class to help with memory fragmentation.
e.g.
BEFORE:
try
{
results = customer.getResults(query);
} catch ( IOException ioex ) {
// ...
}
if ( null == results )
{
results = new int[0]{};
}
// do stuff
AFTER
try
{
results = ArrayUtils.nullToEmpty(customer.getResults(query));
} catch ( IOException ioex ) {
// ...
}
// do stuff
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