[java] Concatenating null strings in Java

Why does the following work? I would expect a NullPointerException to be thrown.

String s = null;
s = s + "hello";
System.out.println(s); // prints "nullhello"

This is behavior specified in the Java API's String.valueOf(Object) method. When you do concatenation, valueOf is used to get the String representation. There is a special case if the Object is null, in which case the string "null" is used.

public static String valueOf(Object obj)

Returns the string representation of the Object argument.

Parameters: obj - an Object.

Returns:

if the argument is null, then a string equal to "null"; otherwise, the value of obj.toString() is returned.

You are not using the "null" and therefore you don't get the exception. If you want the NullPointer, just do

String s = null;
s = s.toString() + "hello";

And I think what you want to do is:

String s = "";
s = s + "hello";

The second line is transformed to the following code:

s = (new StringBuilder()).append((String)null).append("hello").toString();

The append methods can handle null arguments.

See section 5.4 and 15.18 of the Java Language specification:

String conversion applies only to the operands of the binary + operator when one of the arguments is a String. In this single special case, the other argument to the + is converted to a String, and a new String which is the concatenation of the two strings is the result of the +. String conversion is specified in detail within the description of the string concatenation + operator.

and

If only one operand expression is of type String, then string conversion is performed on the other operand to produce a string at run time. The result is a reference to a String object (newly created, unless the expression is a compile-time constant expression (§15.28))that is the concatenation of the two operand strings. The characters of the left-hand operand precede the characters of the right-hand operand in the newly created string. If an operand of type String is null, then the string "null" is used instead of that operand.