Which would you choose / use? 1️⃣

it.toString()

or 2️⃣

"$it"

or 3️⃣ something else? Is 1️⃣ and 2️⃣ equivalent?

I hadn’t thought about that before, but what’s so bad about

2

? If it’s really equivalent (no performance penalty), it’s actually more concise.

The intention with 1 is more obvious. And

toString

in Kotlin is an extension on

Any?

and handles null correctly.

I’ve only started thinking about it because i changed an instance of 1️⃣ to be an instance of 2️⃣ in my project and it introduced a

IllegalFormatConversionException

. I’m still none the wiser as to why because they both produce a String.

@mkrussel nice! Didn’t know that it returns

"null"

, would have expected

null

. I learn something new about Kotlin every day! 🙂

Yes, that’s exactly what i was doing. In an android project formatting a string for presenting on the screen. I find it very confusing as to how it was even a problem.