String Manipulation - IsNullOrEmpty Method

I guess we all need to check strings all around the code. And for that, we have about gazillion ways, and here are some -BAD- examples:

1. if (ourString == null)
2. if (ourString == "")
3. if (ourString.trim() == "")
4. if (ourString == string.empty)

Luckily, Microsoft have came up with this great method "IsNullOrEmpty" which has something like this:

return val == null || val == String.Empty;

This is a great function thought it doesn't cover 100% of the cases.  Lets say, for example, that I have this string: "    ".

Now, according to Microsoft the IsNullOrEmpty method will return false.
Unfortunately, this is not a good result for us.

In order to fix this in our projects, we added this small method:

public static bool IsNullOrEmpty(this String val)

{

    return val == null || val.trim() == String.Empty;

}

This will resolve our problem.
So now we can use:

bool b = String.IsNullOrEmpty("  ");

And we will get true.

.Net 4 Users:
For you guys Microsoft fixed that thing in the form of

bool b = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace("   ");

Which will return true.

Good luck
Elad Shalom,
CTO at ITweetLive.com