Flattening nested optionals resulting from try?

Paul Hudson      @twostraws

SE-0230 modifies the way try? works so that nested optionals are flattened to become regular optionals. This makes it work the same way as optional chaining and conditional typecasts, both of which flatten optionals in earlier Swift versions.

Here’s a practical example that demonstrates the change:

struct User {
    var id: Int

    init?(id: Int) {
        if id < 1 {
            return nil
        }

        self.id = id
    }

    func getMessages() throws -> String {
        // complicated code here
        return "No messages"
    }
}

let user = User(id: 1)
let messages = try? user?.getMessages()

The User struct has a failable initializer, because we want to make sure folks create users with a valid ID. The getMessages() method would in theory contain some sort of complicated code to get a list of all the messages for the user, so it’s marked as throws; I’ve made it return a fixed string so the code compiles.

The key line is the last one: because the user is optional it uses optional chaining, and because getMessages() can throw it uses try? to convert the throwing method into an optional, so we end up with a nested optional. In Swift 4.2 and earlier this would make messages a String?? – an optional optional string – but in Swift 5.0 and later try? won’t wrap values in an optional if they are already optional, so messages will just be a String?.

This new behavior matches the existing behavior of optional chaining and conditional typecasting. That is, you could use optional chaining a dozen times in a single line of code if you wanted, but you wouldn’t end up with 12 nested optionals. Similarly, if you used optional chaining with as?, you would still end up with only one level of optionality, because that’s usually what you want.

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Other changes in Swift 5.0…

• Raw strings
• A standard Result type
• Customizing string interpolation
• Dynamically callable types
• Handling future enum cases
• Checking for integer multiples
• Transforming and unwrapping dictionary values with compactMapValues()

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