Difference between null and empty (“”) Java String

Question

What is the difference between null and the "" (empty string)?

I have written some simple code:

String a = "";
String b = null;

System.out.println(a == b); // false
System.out.println(a.equals(b)); // false

Both statements return false. It seems, I am not able to find what is the actual difference between them.

Answer 1

here a is an Object but b(null) is not an Object it is a null reference

System.out.println(a instanceof Object); // true

System.out.println(b instanceof Object); // false

here is my similar answer

Answer 2

This concept can be better understood from mathematics. Have you ever tried dividing a number (not zero) by 0 using a calculator e.g 7/0? You will get a result that looks like something this: undefined, not a number, null etc. This means that the operation is impossible, for some reasons (let's leave those reasons to be discussed another day).

Now, perform this: 0/7. You will get the output, 0. This means that the operation is possible and can be executed, but you the answer is just 0 because nothing is left after the division. There is a valid output and that output is zero.

In the first example, not only was the output invalid, the operation was not possible to execute. This is akin to null string in java. The second example is akin to empty string.

Answer 3

What your statements are telling you is just that "" isn't the same as null - which is true. "" is an empty string; null means that no value has been assigned.

It might be more enlightening to try:

System.out.println(a.length()); // 0
System.out.println(b.length()); // error; b is not an object

"" is still a string, meaning you can call its methods and get meaningful information. null is an empty variable - there's literally nothing there.

Answer 4

"" and null both are different . the first one means as part of string variable declaration the string constant has been created in the string pool and some memory has been assigned for the same.

But when we are declaring it with null then it has just been instantiated jvm , but no memory has been allocated for it. therefore if you are trying to access this object by checking it with "" - blank variable , it can't prevent nullpointerexception . Please find below one use-case.

public class StringCheck {

public static void main(String[] args) {
    // TODO Auto-generated method stub

    String s1 = "siddhartha";
    String s2 = "";
    String s3 = null;

    System.out.println("length s1 ="+s1.length());
    System.out.println("length s2 ="+s2.length());

    //this piece of code will still throw nullpointerexception . 
    if(s3 != ""){
        System.out.println("length s3 ="+s3.length());
    }
}

}

Answer 5

null means the name isn't referencing any instantiated object. "" means an empty string.

Here a is referencing some object which happens to be an empty string. b isn't referencing any object as it's null.

Answer 6

"" is an actual string, albeit an empty one.

null, however, means that the String variable points to nothing.

a==b returns false because "" and null do not occupy the same space in memory--in other words, their variables don't point to the same objects.

a.equals(b) returns false because "" does not equal null, obviously.

The difference is though that since "" is an actual string, you can still invoke methods or functions on it like

a.length()

a.substring(0, 1)

and so on.

If the String equals null, like b, Java would throw a NullPointerException if you tried invoking, say:

b.length()

---

If the difference you are wondering about is == versus equals, it's this:

== compares references, like if I went

String a = new String("");
String b = new String("");
System.out.println(a==b);

That would output false because I allocated two different objects, and a and b point to different objects.

However, a.equals(b) in this case would return true, because equals for Strings will return true if and only if the argument String is not null and represents the same sequence of characters.

Be warned, though, that Java does have a special case for Strings.

String a = "abc";
String b = "abc";
System.out.println(a==b);

You would think that the output would be false, since it should allocate two different Strings. Actually, Java will intern literal Strings (ones that are initialized like a and b in our example). So be careful, because that can give some false positives on how == works.