If a string contains leading and trailing characters to be removed, you can remove them with StringUtils.strip( ). The strip( ) method differs from trim( ) in that you can specify a set of characters to strip from the beginning and end of a string. In this example, dashes and asterisks are stripped from the start and end of a string:

String original = "-------***---SHAZAM!---***-------";
String stripped = StringUtils.strip( original, "-*" );
System.out.println( "Stripped: " + stripped )

This produces the following output:

Stripped: SHAZAM!

Use trimToNull( ) to test if a given parameter is present. Take the following servlet code as an example:

public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
    throws IOException, ServletException {
    String companyName = 
        StringUtils.trimToNull( request.getParameter("companyName") );
    if( companyName != null ) {
        response.getWriter( ).write( "You supplied a company name!" );
    }
}

Using StringUtils reduces code complexity incrementally—four or five lines of code at a time. Testing for the absence or emptiness of a string usually entails checking to see if a string is empty or of zero length, and because a string could be null, you always need to check for null to avoid throwing a NullPointerException. In this last example, empty has the same meaning as null—the StringUtils.trimToNull( ) method takes a string as a parameter, and if it is null or empty, the method returns a null.