Use of array of zero length

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An example. Say, you have a function

public String[] getFileNames(String criteria) {

to get some filenames. Imagine that you don’t find any filenames satisfying criteria. What do you return? You have 2 choices – either return null, or 0-sized array.

The variant with 0-sized array is better, because your caller doesn’t need to check for NULL and can process the array in a consistent way – say, in a loop (which would be empty in this case).

There’s a chapter on this in Effective Java, Item 27

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