Summary: Optionals

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    October 13th 2021

Updated for Xcode 15

In these chapters we’ve covered one of Swift’s most important features, and although most people find optionals hard to understand at first almost everyone agrees they are useful in practice.

Let’s recap what we learned:

• Optionals let us represent the absence of data, which means we’re able to say “this integer has no value” – that’s different from a fixed number such as 0.
• As a result, everything that isn’t optional definitely has a value inside, even if that’s just an empty string.
• Unwrapping an optional is the process of looking inside a box to see what it contains: if there’s a value inside it’s sent back for use, otherwise there will be nil inside.
• We can use if let to run some code if the optional has a value, or guard let to run some code if the optional doesn’t have a value – but with guard we must always exit the function afterwards.
• The nil coalescing operator, ??, unwraps and returns an optional’s value, or uses a default value instead.
• Optional chaining lets us read an optional inside another optional with a convenient syntax.
• If a function might throw errors, you can convert it into an optional using try? – you’ll either get back the function’s return value, or nil if an error is thrown.

Optionals are second only to closures when it comes to language features folks struggle to learn, but I promise after a few months you’ll wonder how you could live without them!

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