Suggestion: Add the method isEmpty in the classes StringBuilder and StringBuffer

[Hildeberto Mendonça]

Hello,

we have a scenario where a project with approximately 500K lines of code is
going through a large refactoring. One of the changes was to replace string
concatenations in loops by StringBuilder. Within the logic we found the
following condition:

for(...) {
   if(str.isEmpty()) {
      // do something
   }
}

After using StringBuilder,we had to change it to:

for(...) {
   if(str.length() == 0) {
      // do something
   }
}

... which is a less readable code than the previous code. Having shown
that, we would like to know if there was a previous discution on the
inclusion or not of a method isEmpty in the StringBuilder. if yes, why it
is not there, if no, can we actually have it on Java8 or in a near future?

We can actually find other similar String-like methods within
StringBuilder, such as charAt, replace and others.

We would like to know if it is worthwhile to be discussed and taken forward.

Best regards,

-- 
Hildeberto Mendonça, Ph.D
Blog: http://www.hildeberto.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/htmfilho <http://www.cejug.org>