Just today I was loading objects from an ODBCRow and wrote a:

Collection>>addIfNotNilOrBlank !

Like you said...sometimes you get '', sometimes you get nil!

Take care,

Rob


On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 6:02 PM, Keith Hodges <keith_hodges@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
When I think about this issue in different terms I think it makes more
sense. No matter how perfect my code I find myself interfacing to things
like MySQL where it is happy to return nil when it means an empty string.

someValue ifNotUsefulUse: [ defaultValue ].

but then the question "what does useful mean", at which point it becomes
easier to define clearly what is not useful i.e.

someValue ifNilOrEmpty: [ defaultValue ].

If I had known this call existed I would use it much more because

b := someValue ifEmpty: [ defaultValue ].

doesnt work (see earlier discussions on squeak-dev)

regards

Keith

_______________________________________________
Pharo-project mailing list
Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr
http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project