Groovy's Safe Navigation Operator Not as Safe as I Thought

The safe navigation operator is almost certainly my favorite operator in Groovy. It allows you to guard against NullPointerException(s) much more cleanly than defining a nasty if/else mess. Consider the following example.

class Book {
    String title
    Author author
}

class Author {
    String firstName
    String lastName
}

def author = new Author(firstName:'Jason')
def book = new Book(title:'Say no to NPEs', author:author)

println book.author?.lastName

Did you see that ?. operator on the last line of the code sample? That's the safe navigation operator, and it's the equivalent of writing the following if statement (although it's much more readable).

if (book.author != null) {
    println book.author.lastName
}

The safe navigation operator essentially checks to see if the object you're about to invoke a method on is null. If it is null, it simply skips the method invocation and returns null. If it isn't null, it proceeds as usual. It works for method chaining too, so if you're worried about book being null, you could write

println book?.author?.lastName

This way, if either book or author are null, you simply print out null instead of causing a NullPointerException.

Since learning about the safe navigation operator, I've used it successfully in dozens of classes without any problem. Until last week. Consider the following line of code .

println book?.author?.firstName?.trim().concat(" is great.")

Thanks to the safe navigation operator we can write this concatenation of firstName and a sentence fragment without worrying about NullPointerException(s) and ugly if blocks. Or so I thought.

Looking at this line of code, I thought for sure I was safe from any sneaky NullPointerException. If book, author or firstName are null I'll simply end up printing null and not have to worry about the concat() method. After all, if the trim() method succeeds, there's no sense in guarding it's result for null. And that's where I was wrong.

I naively assumed the method chain would stop once the safe navigation operator encountered a null when in fact it does not. While the trim() method is safe from being called on a null firstName object, it will return null, upon which the concat() method is called. Oops!