Two helper methods

[recurve]

These two helper methods are in some other open source libraries but we don't always include those. It bugged me enough that I added them here.

Signed-off-by: Aaron Rosenzweig [email protected]

[paulhoadley]

Hang on... Aaron, does this differ significantly from stringIsNullOrEmpty()? If so, I don't see it, other than providing the converse method in the same patch.

[recurve]

Hi Paul. If you feel strongly you can revert these changes, I don't feel that passionate that they have to be here. But to answer your question there is a difference between "empty" and "blank". The "stringIsNullOrEmpty()" does not trim a string. The two methods "isBlank" and "isNotBlank" are easier to read and use but of course, that is just opinion.

[paulhoadley]

Thanks for pointing out the use of trim(), Aaron, I didn't notice that. I still worry about the proliferation of subtly-different methods in these kitchen-sink utility classes. I completely agree with Kieran in that we should encourage the use of, say, Commons Lang rather than be continually reinventing wheels. I've got nothing against Aaron's methods in particular, but this is just a good example of a wider problem. @pascalrobert, you merged the request—comments?

[pascalrobert]

I must admit that I didn't check if similar methods already existed. And yes, we should use the Apache Commons stuff wherever we can.

[paulhoadley]

Well, I've got nothing against Aaron, or his methods in particular, nor should this comment be taken to mean that I think that ERXStringUtilities is otherwise perfect, but... I think this commit should be reverted.

[ishimoto]

Sorry to see this is closed. I hand't a time to look but "isBlank" and "isNotBlank" isn't bad.
But it is not perfect, it would be nice to implement it but also not only with a English Space trim. Also a Chinese, Korean or Japanese space trim. I know you maybe ????
But we have one more Space Char in CKJ, and that would help people writing this kind of Apps.

[recurve]

Hey Ken! That I would like very much. I wasn't aware that "trim()" doesn't account for some unicode whitespace.

[ishimoto]

There are a lot of problems, I will make an presentation about what can happen at WOWODC