Searching for common bugs

Google Code Search isn't anything new, but I had fun with it today to search for a bug that I ran into in my project's code base.

Its a simple error to make:

if ( s == "" )
{
   foo();
}

Correct usage would be

if ( s.equals( "" ) )
{
   foo();
}

The tricky thing is that the first (incorrect) usage will work a surprisingly large percentage of the time.

Most strings will be empty because they were initialized to "" somewhere, rather than the result of a string operation that returned an empty string:

s.substring( s.length() ) // returns an empty string

Being initialized to the constant "" means that s will be pointing to the same jvm object that will be used in the equality comparison in the first if() statement.

Anyway, here is a link to the results of a code search for == ""

google code search for == ""

Interestingly enough, some of the first hits are valid uses of == "" (at least from their comments), because the string was interned first before being used in the comparison.