Additional String helper methods

MikeB

Problem

These are just convienience methods. I use these almost daily in Delphi and I believe they make the code more readable.

Proposed Solution

This is from the Delphi documentation.

IsNullOrEmpty Is a static class function that returns whether the given string is empty or not (does not contain any characters).
IsNullOrWhiteSpace Indicates if a specified string is empty or consists only of white-space characters.

Example Workflow

Instead of coding

If tfTemplateName.Text.Trim() = "" Then
....
End If

you would have

If String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(tfTemplateName.Text) Then
...
End If

Alternatives Considered

Who Would This Help?

einhugur

MikeB

String in objo is not nullable at all. Which makes the need for IsNullOrEmpty pretty mute point.

That then would leave only IsEmpty and IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace

Richard_And_Trisha

can't you add a extend function for String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace??

MikeB

Richard_And_Trisha
I could do that. But just like in Delphi it is convenient if a helper method like that is a standard part of the language.

Richard_And_Trisha

MikeB what other nice things that Delphi has ??

bgrommes

Objo already has IsEmpty().
https://docs.objo.dev/#/stdlib/string?id=isempty

For completeness I could see IsEmptyOrWhitespace(), as well as IsWhitespace().

Weirdly in .NET IsWhitespace only takes chars so you have to bring LINQ into it:
myString.Any(char.IsWhiteSpace);

Garry

Objo strings can’t be Nothing, so I don’t think we should add IsNullOrEmpty or IsNullOrWhiteSpace as .NET/Delphi-style shared methods.

The existing empty-string check is:

If tfTemplateName.Text.IsEmpty() Then
...
End If

That said, I agree there’s room for a whitespace convenience method. I’ll add an instance method named IsEmptyOrWhitespace(), so the common validation case becomes:

If tfTemplateName.Text.IsEmptyOrWhitespace() Then
...
End If

I'll also add IsWhitespace().

This will be in the next release: https://feedback.objo.dev/feature/509