In my last blog post, I wrote about the proper way to check for empty enumerations and proposed an IsNullOrEmpty method for collections which sparked a lot of discussion.
This post covers a similar issue, but from a different angle. A very long time ago, I wrote about my love for the null coalescing operator. However, over time, I’ve found it to be not quite as useful as it could be when dealing with strings. For example, here’s the code I might want to write:
public static void DoSomething(string argument) {
var theArgument = argument ?? "defaultValue";
Console.WriteLine(theArgument);
}
But here’s the code I actually end up writing:
public static void DoSomething(string argument) {
var theArgument = argument;
if(String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(theArgument)) {
theArgument = "defaultValue";
}
Console.WriteLine(theArgument);
}
The issue here is that I want to treat an argument that consists only of whitespace as if the argument is null and replace the value with my default value. This is something the null coalescing operator won’t help me with.
This lead me to jokingly propose a null or empty coalescing operator on Twitter with the syntax ???. This would allow me to write something like:
var s = argument ??? "default";
Of course, that doesn’t go far enough because wouldn’t I also need a null or whitespace coalescing operator???? ;)
Perhaps a better approach than the PERLification of C# is to write an extension method that normalizes string in such a way you can use the tried and true (and existing!) null coalescing operator.
Thus I present to you the AsNullIfEmpty and AsNullIfWhiteSpace methods!
Here’s my previous example refactored to use these methods.
public static void DoSomething(string argument) {
var theArgument = argument.AsNullIfWhiteSpace() ?? "defaultValue";
Console.WriteLine(theArgument);
}
You can also take the same approach with collections.
public static void DoSomething(IEnumerable<string> argument) {
var theArgument = argument.AsNullIfEmpty() ?? new string[]{"default"};
Console.WriteLine(theArgument.Count());
}
The following is the code for these simple methods.
public static class EnumerationExtensions {
public static string AsNullIfEmpty(this string items) {
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(items)) {
return null;
}
return items;
}
public static string AsNullIfWhiteSpace(this string items) {
if (String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(items)) {
return null;
}
return items;
}
public static IEnumerable<T> AsNullIfEmpty<T>(this IEnumerable<T> items) {
if (items == null || !items.Any()) {
return null;
}
return items;
}
}
Another approach that some commenters to my last post recommended is to write a Coalesce method. That’s also a pretty straightforward approach which I leave as an exercise to the reader. :)