What are the benefits of "String".equals(otherString)

Question

in a tutorial (for implementing a xml parser) i saw the following code:

if( "NODENAME".equals(xmlreader.getNodeName()) ) {  // getNodeName() returns java.lang.String
... 
}

Is there a reason to write a string comparision like that?.

This may be some kind of best/bad practice or code like that could give some performance benefit. I would like to know if i should use this in commercial projects.

Answer 1

That saves you from a NullPointerException.

That is Yoda Condition used to solve unsafe null behavior.

In programming jargon, Yoda Conditions (also called Yoda Notation) is a programming style where the two parts of an expression are reversed in a conditional statement.

Advantage is

Swapping the two conditional values does not change the behavior of the program. A common mistake is to accidentally assign a value instead of writing a conditional statement.