Why is myString.equals(“aString”); different from “aString”.equals(myString);?

Question

I heard several times that in using boolean equals(Object o) to compare Strings, it\'s better to put the constant on the left side of the function

Answer 1

This is poor design, because you are hiding NullPointerExceptions. Instead of being alerted that string is null, you will instead get some weird program behaviour and an exception being thrown somewhere else.

But that all depends if 'null' is a valid state for your string. In general 'null's should never be considered a reasonable object state for passing around.