title: Get empty string when null
body: <p>I want to get string values of my fields (they can be type of long string or any object),</p>
  
  <p>if a field is null then it should return empty string, I did this with guava;</p>
  
  <pre><code>nullToEmpty(String.valueOf(gearBox))
  nullToEmpty(String.valueOf(id))
  ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But this returns null if gearbox is null! Not empty string because valueOf methdod returns string "null" which leads to errors.</p>
  
  <p>Any Ideas?</p>
  
  <p>EDIt: there are 100s fields I look for something easy to implement</p>