So, there is a language specification support for the understanding that the constant string "" from one class, will be both String.equals() and == another constant string "" in the same Java runtime.
However, there is nothing in the Jetty documentation that specifies that the return result of .getParameter() will be a constant string when it is empty. So, any code that assumes this is susceptible to breakage with any change to the Jetty implementation. Even a very small indirect change could influence whether or not it *happens* to return a constant string or not. I stand firmly by my stance that such code should never have passed code review. That something happens to work, isn't sufficient quality code for deployment, and it certainly isn't a good reason to restore the old behaviour.
Despite it being a really bad assumption... you piqued my curiosity as to exactly how it might have happened that the behaviour changed.
I think this was the commit that "broke" you:
It looks like the code previously had a few hard coded locations where it would have a fast path for zero string ( l==0 ? "" : ... ), a fast path for strings that had no decoding requirements, and a slow path for decoding. Greg replaced several of these with generic code that would would do the right thing every time in one common place. The replacement code probably does not special case "if empty string, return constant empty string."
Probably, the behaviour could be restored in one place. But, probably this would be a very bad precedent to set, as it basically agrees that users can expect constant literals to be returned everywhere else they might currently be returned, and this could lead to enabling other bad code to continue functioning instead of being corrected. I'm tempted to go the opposite way here - purposefully avoiding the use of String.intern() or constants, specifically to avoid the case of people relying on undocumented behaviour. Prevent people from making a mistake in the first place.
This is for request.getParameter
We were using Jetty 8 and now trying to upgrade on Jetty 9. The below piece of code has different results in both versions of Jetty.
if (a != "")
Where a is string variable.
I understand the code is wrong, we should always use a.equals for comparison. But we have it at so many places, but not sure why Jetty 8 and Jetty 9 have different results for it.
If you think the question above is valid, then the code is so much more wrong than you are recognizing. :-)
The "" generates a constant string that is at least in principle allocated in the *calling* class. This means it is part of your class. Within your class, it is *possible* that the compiler will do de-duplication of the constant strings, and emit just one constant string representing "" for your whole class, which means that it is *possible* that "" will have the same identity anywhere in your class. I emphasize *possible*, as there is no language level guarantee for this. This is an invalid assumption that should never make it past code review.
Any "" that gets generated from other classes, would either start from a constant string defined in another class (with a different identity!), or start from a char[0] which will always have a new identity. There is almost zero way your code could work in Jetty 8.
"Might work sometimes" dependent upon a runtime feature that was probably not understood at the time it was accidentally selected, is a very bad way to write code.
You need to fix your code.
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