Unexpected NullPointerException in Java 17 Stream Processing After Filtering
I'm testing a new approach and I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm encountering a `NullPointerException` when using Java 17's Stream API to filter a list of objects. My list contains some null values, and I expect the filtering operation to skip these null entries, but instead, it throws an exception. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```java import java.util.Arrays; import java.util.List; public class StreamFilterDemo { public static void main(String[] args) { List<String> names = Arrays.asList("Alice", null, "Bob", null, "Charlie"); names.stream() .filter(name -> name.equals("Alice")) // This line causes the NPE .forEach(System.out::println); } } ``` When I run the above code, I get the following stack trace: ``` Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke "String.equals(Object)" because "name" is null at StreamFilterDemo.main(StreamFilterDemo.java:6) ``` I initially thought that the Stream API would handle null values gracefully, but it seems that the lambda expression in the `filter` method is evaluating `name.equals("Alice")` before ensuring `name` isn't null. I've tried changing the filter condition to check for nulls first: ```java .filter(name -> name != null && name.equals("Alice")) ``` This works, but it feels somewhat cumbersome. Is there a cleaner way to handle this scenario in Java? I also looked into using `Optional`, but I'm not sure if it's the right approach here. Any suggestions on best practices for filtering out null values in a Stream without causing unexpected exceptions would be greatly appreciated! My development environment is Windows. My team is using Java for this microservice. Could this be a known issue?