Boolean String?

[Purplecopter]

I'm sure I've just missed something in my textbook relating to this exact topic, and this is going to sound like a stupid question to people in the know but:

Can you ask a boolean question of a String? I want to say if nameString is not equal to "null" then do something. If not, is a another way I can get the same result?

[DocEvi1]

depends on the language is the short answer, yes is the long one

for instance in java:

String s = "hello";
String t = "hi";
if (s.equals(t) )
{
    //does nothing
}
else
{
   //say hello
}

i.e. the function ".equals" returns a boolean expression.

The answer is yes btw

[Purplecopter]

thanks for that, if forgot to mention java was the language. what can i add to that to make 's' not equal 't'? for example '!=' as opposed to '=='. and are there any java code dictionaries out there i can download so i can work these things out myself?

[Purplecopter]

nevermind, problem solved. i was relying on the default value of empty strings (ie null) behaving like a string, this is not the case so i just gave all unused strings the value "empty"

[DocEvi1]

the if statement would be

if( ! s.equals(t) )

you could assign the empty string to be "".

The API spec is : http://java.sun.com/reference/api/index.html but you can download it from http://java.sun.com/docs/index.html