This method works nicely if a person has a middle ...

# codereview

[Colton Idle]

This method works nicely if a person has a middle name, but if they don't. Then it print [FIRST]..[LAST] Notice the two dots are supposed to show that there are two spaces. What's a convenient way of only having a single space?

private fun Person.prettyPrint() =
        "${this.data.firstName} ${this.data.middleName} ${this.data.lastName}"

[Adam Powell]

use a collection and .joinToString, but also https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/ 🙂

[Colton Idle]

Yeah. I have that website favorited. In this case, the data model and everything is already created and I'm just trying to move this bug fix along. I did let them know that we could/should probably just keep everything as a single string.

[Richard Gomez]

For this type of thing you could also just write the different formats explicitly in a conditional statement.

For example:

data class Component(val type: String, val namespace: String? = null, val name: String, val version: String) {
    val displayName: String by lazy { if (namespace != null) "$namespace:$name" else name }
}

[ephemient]

as a convenience, if some parts may be null and you want to skip them,

listOfNotNull(first, middle, last).joinToString(" ")

(or .takeIf { it.isNotEmpty() } to make empty strings into null so that listOfNotNull skips them) but yeah, human names definitely don't all fit that model