.NET 4.0 : String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace Method

Hello one more time guys,

So I think the most of you are familiar with string.IsNullOrEmpty method which is very useful when you’re checking your string on actually having the data for different reasons:

• Sometimes we need to parse the string
• Add something to the string
• Use some of the string members
• AND try to see if the data from the database/xml/file is valid.

But now another problem is around: often the data in database has some whitespaces because there are constraints on some varchar columns NOT NULL. To works these around when something is not available, someone could insert a whitespace, and this would solve the problem, for the moment.

Actually it’s not a lot of fun to do something like

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(" ") && " ".Trim() != string.Empty) 

{
            

}

What’s why .NET framework 4.0 has the string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method.

To compare there 2 methods I did the following program:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace Intro.StringIsNullOrWhiteSpace
{
    class Program
    {
        /// 

        /// The main entry point for the application.
        /// 
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // let's say we have a Dictionary of int - string
            // the string representation of a number. Example: 1 - one
            Dictionary integerDictionary = new Dictionary();
            integerDictionary.Add(1, "one");
            integerDictionary.Add(2, "two");
            integerDictionary.Add(300, "three hundreds");
            integerDictionary.Add(4, "four");
            integerDictionary.Add(67, "sixty seven");

            // let's assume that we don't know anything about the data in the dictionary
            // we also could have something like
            integerDictionary.Add(5000, null);
            integerDictionary.Add(50001, string.Empty);
            integerDictionary.Add(56565, " ");
            integerDictionary.Add(23, " \r\n ");

            // now let's check it with string.IsNullOrEmpty
            Console.WriteLine("string.IsNullOrEmpty");
            Console.WriteLine("===================================");
            foreach (var keyValuePair in integerDictionary)
            {
                if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(keyValuePair.Value))
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(keyValuePair.Value + " - True");
                }
                else
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(keyValuePair.Value + " - False");
                }
            }
            Console.ReadKey();
            Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);

            // let's check it now with the new one : string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace
            Console.WriteLine("string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace");
            Console.WriteLine("===================================");
            foreach (var keyValuePair in integerDictionary)
            {
                if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(keyValuePair.Value))
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(keyValuePair.Value + " - True");
                }
                else
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(keyValuePair.Value + " - False");
                }
            }
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

Here is the output of the program:

Have a nice day and  use it in .NET 4.0 !