Re: null in HTML fields plus other stuff

[Phil Swenson]

I personally don't allow nulls for most things...I have a little utility method that blanks nulls (StringUtil.blankNull(String s)) that I call in all my "set" methods in my Java classes.  Using this method you will just be printing empty strings and won't see any "null" in your presentation.   Example in a "Person" class   class Person{     private String name;     public setName(String name){         this.name = StringUtil.blankNull(name);     }    }   part of my utility class:   class StringUtil{     public static String blankNull(String s){     if (s==null)       return new String("");     else       return s;   } }   I've always been a bit confused about a call to return ""...it should return a an empty string, but I kept encountering nulls, so now I always use return new String("") instead.     I'd love to hear any critique of this method (I'm still new to Java)...