Good practice to initalize all instance variables with type String to emptr

Question

Is it a good practice to initalize all instance variables with
type String to emptry string?
#1 approach:
public class A
{ private String name = "";
private String address ="";
//etc...
rather than
#2 approach:
public class A
{ private String name;
private String address;
//etc...
When I read Java books, the examples don't usually do #1 approach.
The problem is if we don't initialize to empty string, when we call
the getter method of that instance variable, it will return null.
Please advise. Thanks!!

Answer 1

Please advise. Thanks!!It depends on your coding style. If you can avoid lots of checks for null Strings in the rest of the code then why not initialize to "".
You have the same situation when a method returns an array. If you under circumstances return a null array reference then you have to always check for this special case, but if you return a zero length array instead you have no special case. All loops will just run 0 iterations and everything will work fine.
So in general I guess the return of zero objects instead of null references really boils down to whether it simplicates the rest of your code by removing lots of extra checks for the special null case. This usage is especially favourable in the zero length array case. See Effective Java by Bloch, item 27.