How to do ToString for a possibly null object?

Question

Is there a simple way of doing the following:

String s = myObj == null ? "" : myObj.ToString(); 

I know I can do the following, but I really consider it as a hack:

String s = "" + myObj; 

It would be great if Convert.ToString() had a proper overload for this.

Answer 1

C# 6.0 Edit:

With C# 6.0 we can now have a succinct, cast-free version of the orignal method:

string s = myObj?.ToString() ?? ""; 

Or even using interpolation:

string s = $"{myObj}"; 

Original Answer:

string s = (myObj ?? String.Empty).ToString(); 

or

string s = (myObjc ?? "").ToString() 

to be even more concise.

Unfortunately, as has been pointed out you'll often need a cast on either side to make this work with non String or Object types:

string s = (myObjc ?? (Object)"").ToString() string s = ((Object)myObjc ?? "").ToString() 

Therefore, while it maybe appears elegant, the cast is almost always necessary and is not that succinct in practice.

As suggested elsewhere, I recommend maybe using an extension method to make this cleaner:

public static string ToStringNullSafe(this object value) {     return (value ?? string.Empty).ToString(); } 

Answer 2

string.Format("{0}", myObj); 

string.Format will format null as an empty string and call ToString() on non-null objects. As I understand it, this is what you were looking for.