< What’s the difference between a task and a detached task?

How to get a Result from a task

Paul Hudson @twostraws November 28th 2021

Updated for Xcode 15

If you want to read the return value from a Task directly, you should read its value using await, or use try await if it has a throwing operation. However, all tasks also have a result property that returns an instance of Swift’s Result struct, generic over the type returned by the task as well as whether it might contain an error or not.

To demonstrate this, we could write some code that creates a task to fetch and decode a string from a URL. To start with we’re going to make this task throw errors if the download fails, or if the data can’t be converted to a string.

Here’s the code:

enum LoadError: Error {
    case fetchFailed, decodeFailed
}

func fetchQuotes() async {
    let downloadTask = Task { () -> String in
        let url = URL(string: "https://hws.dev/quotes.txt")!
        let data: Data

        do {
            (data, _) = try await URLSession.shared.data(from: url)
        } catch {
            throw LoadError.fetchFailed
        }

        if let string = String(data: data, encoding: .utf8) {
            return string
        } else {
            throw LoadError.decodeFailed
        }
    }

    let result = await downloadTask.result

    do {
        let string = try result.get()
        print(string)
    } catch LoadError.fetchFailed {
        print("Unable to fetch the quotes.")
    } catch LoadError.decodeFailed {
        print("Unable to convert quotes to text.")
    } catch {
        print("Unknown error.")
    }
}

await fetchQuotes()

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There’s not a lot of code there, but there are a few things I want to point out as being important:

Our task might return a string, but also might throw one of two errors. So, when we ask for its result property we’ll be given a Result<String, Error>.
Although we need to use await to get the result, we don’t need to use try even though there could be errors there. This is because we’re just reading out the result, not trying to read the successful value.
We call get() on the Result object to read the successful, but that’s when try is needed because it’s when Swift checks whether an error occurred or not.
When it comes to catching errors, we need a “catch everything” block at the end, even though we know we’ll only throw LoadError.

That last point hits us because Swift isn’t able to evaluate the task to see exactly what kinds of error are thrown inside, and there’s no way of adding that annotation ourself because Swift doesn’t support typed throws.

If you don’t care what errors are thrown, or don’t mind digging through Foundation’s various errors yourself, you can avoid handling errors in the task and just let them propagate up:

func fetchQuotes() async {
    let downloadTask = Task { () -> String in
        let url = URL(string: "https://hws.dev/quotes.txt")!
        let (data, _) = try await URLSession.shared.data(from: url)
        return String(decoding: data, as: UTF8.self)
    }

    let result = await downloadTask.result

    do {
        let string = try result.get()
        print(string)
    } catch {
        print("Unknown error.")
    }
}

await fetchQuotes()

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The main take aways here are:

All tasks can return a Result if you want.
For the error type, the Result will either contain Error or Never.
Although we need to use await to get the result, we don’t need to use try until we try to get the success value inside.

Many places where Result was useful are now better served through async/await, but Result is still useful for storing in a single value the success or failure of some operation. Yes, in the code above we evaluate the result immediately for brevity, but the power of Result is that it’s value you can pass around elsewhere in your code to deal with at a later time.

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How to get a Result from a task

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