How to handle function failure with optionals

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    October 13th 2021

Updated for Xcode 15

When we call a function that might throw errors, we either call it using try and handle errors appropriately, or if we’re certain the function will not fail we use try! and accept that if we were wrong our code will crash. (Spoiler: you should use try! very rarely.)

However, there is an alternative: if all we care about is whether the function succeeded or failed, we can use an optional try to have the function return an optional value. If the function ran without throwing any errors then the optional will contain the return value, but if any error was thrown the function will return nil. This means we don’t get to know exactly what error was thrown, but often that’s fine – we might just care if the function worked or not.

Here’s how it looks:

enum UserError: Error {
    case badID, networkFailed
}

func getUser(id: Int) throws -> String {
    throw UserError.networkFailed
}

if let user = try? getUser(id: 23) {
    print("User: \(user)")
}

The getUser() function will always throw a networkFailed error, which is fine for our testing purposes, but we don’t actually care what error was thrown – all we care about is whether the call sent back a user or not.

This is where try? helps: it makes getUser() return an optional string, which will be nil if any errors are thrown. If you want to know exactly what error happened then this approach won’t be useful, but a lot of the time we just don’t care.

If you want, you can combine try? with nil coalescing, which means “attempt to get the return value from this function, but if it fails use this default value instead.”

Be careful, though: you need to add some parentheses before nil coalescing so that Swift understands exactly what you mean. For example, you’d write this:

let user = (try? getUser(id: 23)) ?? "Anonymous"
print(user)

You’ll find try? is mainly used in three places:

1. In combination with guard let to exit the current function if the try? call returns nil.
2. In combination with nil coalescing to attempt something or provide a default value on failure.
3. When calling any throwing function without a return value, when you genuinely don’t care if it succeeded or not – maybe you’re writing to a log file or sending analytics to a server, for example.

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