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POHow do you deal with strings that have structure?
 

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  1. POHow do you deal with strings that have structure?
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    <p>Suppose I have an object representing a person, with getter and setter methods for the person's email address. The setter method definition might look something like this:</p> <pre><code>setEmailAddress(String emailAddress) { this.emailAddress = emailAddress; } </code></pre> <p>Calling <code>person.setEmailAddress(0)</code>, then, would generate a type error, but calling <code>person.setEmailAddress("asdf")</code> would not - even though "asdf" is in no way a valid email address.</p> <p>In my experience, so-called strings are almost <em>never</em> arbitrary sequences of characters, with no restriction on length or format. URIs come to mind - as do street addresses, as do phone numbers, as do first names ... you get the idea. Yet these data types are most often stored as "just strings".</p> <p>Returning to my person object, suppose I modify <code>setEmailAddress()</code> like so</p> <pre><code>setEmailAddress(EmailAddress emailAddress) // ... </code></pre> <p>where <code>EmailAddress</code> is a class ... whose constructor takes a string representation of an email address. Have I gained anything?</p> <p>OK, so an email address is kind of a bad example. What about a URI class that takes a string representation of a URI as a constructor parameter, and provides methods for managing that URI - setting the path, fetching a query parameter, etc. The validity of the source string becomes important.</p> <p>So I ask all of you, how do you deal with strings that have structure? And how do you make your structural expectations clear in your interfaces?</p> <p>Thank you.</p>
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