What are the benefits of “String”.equals(otherString)

Question

in a tutorial (for implementing a xml parser) i saw the following code:

if( \"NODENAME\".equals(xmlreader.getNodeName()) ) {  // getNodeName() returns java.l         


        

Answer 1

Usually string comparison was written like that to avoid NullPointerException if xmlreader.getNodeName() is null, because then you would have

if("NODENAME".equals(null)) {
    // ... 
}

compared to

if(null.equals("NODENAME")) {
    // ... 
}

which would've thrown.

This is called Yoda condition:

if you expect xmlreader.getNodeName() to be null then it's ok, otherwise I would not rely on this to avoid the exception to be thrown, you should rather deal with it earlier on in your code.