What does an exclamation mark mean in the Swift language

Question

The Swift Programming Language guide has the following example    class Person       let name  String     init name  String    self name   name       var apartment  Apartment      deinit   println    name  is being deinitialized        class Apartment       let number  Int     init number  Int    self number   number       var tenant  Person      deinit   println  Apartment    number  is being deinitialized        var john  Person  var number73  Apartment   john   Person name   John Appleseed   number73   Apartment number  73     From Apple s    The Swift Programming Language    guide  https   developer apple com library content documentation Swift Conceptual Swift Programming Language AutomaticReferenceCounting html    Then when assigning the apartment to the person  they use an exclamation point to  unwrap the instance    john  apartment   number73   What does it mean to  unwrap the instance   Why is it necessary  How is it different from just doing the following   john apartment   number73   I m very new to the Swift language   Just trying to get the basics down    UPDATE  The big piece of the puzzle that I was missing  not directly stated in the answers - at least not at the time of writing this  is that when you do the following   var john  Person    that does NOT mean that  john is of type Person and it might be nil   as I originally thought  I was simply misunderstanding that Person and Person  are completely separate types   Once I grasped that  all of the other      madness  and the great answers below  made a lot more sense

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An Optional variable may contain a value or may be not

case 1: var myVar:String? = "Something"

case 2: var myVar:String? = nil

now if you ask myVar!, you are telling compiler to return a value in case 1 it will return "Something"

in case 2 it will crash.

Meaning ! mark will force compiler to return a value, even if its not there. thats why the name Force Unwrapping.

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For Googlers  john  department     tells compiler   I know john is optional Use it as if it has value Just crash if it does not  In production  use guard let or if let to deal with the situation of no-value and void hard crashes

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The   at the end of an object says the object is an optional and to unwrap if it can otherwise returns a nil  This is often used to trap errors that would otherwise crash the program

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TL DR  What does an exclamation mark mean in the Swift language      The exclamation mark effectively says     I know that this optional   definitely has a value  please use it     This is known as forced unwrapping of the optional   s value     Example  let possibleString  String     An optional string   print possibleString      requires an exclamation mark to access its value    prints  An optional string    let assumedString  String     An implicitly unwrapped optional string   print assumedString      no exclamation mark is needed to access its value    prints  An implicitly unwrapped optional string     Source  https   developer apple com library content documentation Swift Conceptual Swift Programming Language TheBasics html   apple ref doc uid TP40014097-CH5-XID 399

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The   means that you are force unwrapping the object the   follows   More info can be found  in Apples documentation  which can be found here  https   developer apple com library ios documentation swift conceptual Swift Programming Language TheBasics html

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In objective C variables with no value were equal to  nil  it was also possible to use  nil  values same as 0 and false   hence it was possible to use variables in conditional statements  Variables having values are same as  TRUE  and those with no values were equal to  FALSE     Swift provides type safety by providing  optional value   i e  It prevents errors formed from assigning variables of different types   So in Swift  only booleans can be provided on conditional statements   var hw    Hello World    Here  even-though  hw  is a string  it can t be used in an if statement like in objective C     This is an error  if hw          For that it needs to be created as   var nhw   String     Hello World     This is correct  if nhw

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To put it simply  exclamation marks mean an optional is being unwrapped  An optional is a variable that can have a value or not -- so you can check if the variable is empty  using an if let statement as shown here  and then force unwrap it  If you force unwrap an optional that is empty though  your program will crash  so be careful  Optionals are declared by putting a question mark at the end of an explicit assignment to a variable  for example I could write   var optionalExample  String    This variable has no value  If I were to unwrap it  the program would crash and Xcode would tell you you tried to unwrap an optional with a value of nil    Hope that helped

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What does it mean to  unwrap the instance   Why is it necessary    As far as I can work out  this is very new to me  too      The term  wrapped  implies we should think of an Optional variable as a present  wrapped in shiny paper  which might  sadly   be empty   When  wrapped   the value of an Optional variable is an enum with two possible values  a little like a Boolean    This enum describes whether the variable holds a value  Some T    or not  None    If there is a value  this can be obtained by  unwrapping  the variable  obtaining the T from Some T        How is john  apartment   number73 different from john apartment   number73    Paraphrased    If you write the name of an Optional variable  eg text john  without the     this refers to the  wrapped  enum  Some None   not the value itself  T    So john isn t an instance of Person  and it doesn t have an apartment member   john apartment     Person   does not have a member named  apartment    The actual Person value can be unwrapped in various ways     forced unwrapping   john   gives the Person value if it exists  runtime error if it is nil   optional binding   if let p   john   println p     executes the println if the value exists   optional chaining   john  learnAboutSwift    executes this made-up method if the value exists    I guess you choose one of these ways to unwrap  depending upon what should happen in the nil case  and how likely that is   This language design forces the nil case to be handled explicitly  which I suppose improves safety over Obj-C  where it is easy to forget to handle the nil case    Update   The exclamation mark is also used in the syntax for declaring  Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals    In the examples so far  the john variable has been declared as var john Person   and it is an Optional   If you want the actual value of that variable  you must unwrap it  using one of the three methods above   If it were declared as var john Person  instead  the variable would be an Implicitly Unwrapped Optional  see the section with this heading in Apple s book    There is no need to unwrap this kind of variable when accessing the value  and john can be used without additional syntax   But Apple s book says      Implicitly unwrapped optionals should not be used when there is a possibility of a variable becoming nil at a later point  Always use a normal optional type if you need to check for a nil value during the lifetime of a variable    Update 2   The article  Interesting Swift Features  by Mike Ash gives some motivation for optional types   I think it is great  clear writing   Update 3   Another useful article about the implicitly unwrapped optional use for the exclamation mark   Swift and the Last Mile  by Chris Adamson   The article explains that this is a pragmatic measure by Apple used to declare the types used by their Objective-C frameworks which might contain nil   Declaring a type as optional  using    or implicitly unwrapped  using    is  a tradeoff between safety and convenience    In the examples given in the article  Apple have chosen to declare the types as implicitly unwrapped  making the calling code more convenient  but less safe   Perhaps Apple might comb through their frameworks in the future  removing the uncertainty of implicitly unwrapped   probably never nil   parameters and replacing them with optional   certainly could be nil in particular  hopefully  documented   circumstances   or standard non-optional   is never nil   declarations  based on the exact behaviour of their Objective-C code

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john is an optional var and it can contain a nil value  To ensure that the value isn t nil use a   at the end of the var name  From documentation    Once you   re sure that the optional does contain a value  you can access its underlying value by adding an exclamation mark     to the end of the optional   s name  The exclamation mark effectively says     I know that this optional definitely has a value  please use it     Another way to check non nil value is  optional unwrapping      if let j   json              do something with j

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If you ve come from a C-family language  you will be thinking  pointer to object of type X which might be the memory address 0  NULL    and if you re coming from a dynamically typed language you ll be thinking  Object which is probably of type X but might be of type undefined   Neither of these is actually correct  although in a roundabout way the first one is close   The way you should be thinking of it is as if it s an object like   struct Optional lt T gt       var isNil Boolean    var realObject T     When you re testing your optional value with foo    nil it s really returning foo isNil  and when you say foo  it s returning foo realObject with an assertion that foo isNil    false  It s important to note this because if foo actually is nil when you do foo   that s a runtime error  so typically you d want to use a conditional let instead unless you are very sure that the value will not be nil  This kind of trickery means that the language can be strongly typed without forcing you to test if values are nil everywhere   In practice  it doesn t truly behave like that because the work is done by the compiler  At a high level there is a type Foo  which is separate to Foo  and that prevents funcs which accept type Foo from receiving a nil value  but at a low level an optional value isn t a true object because it has no properties or methods  it s likely that in fact it is a pointer which may by NULL 0  with the appropriate test when force-unwrapping   There other situation in which you d see an exclamation mark is on a type  as in   func foo bar  String         print bar      This is roughly equivalent to accepting an optional with a forced unwrap  i e    func foo bar  String         print bar       You can use this to have a method which technically accepts an optional value but will have a runtime error if it is nil  In the current version of Swift this apparently bypasses the is-not-nil assertion so you ll have a low-level error instead  Generally not a good idea  but it can be useful when converting code from another language

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Here is what I think is the difference   var john  Person    Means john can be nil  john  apartment   number73   The compiler will interpret this line as   if john    nil       john apartment   number73     While  john  apartment   number73   The compiler will interpret this line as simply   john apartment   number73   Hence  using   will unwrap the if statement  and make it run faster  but if john is nil  then a runtime error will happen   So wrap here doesn t mean it is memory wrapped  but it means it is code wrapped  in this case it is wrapped with an if statement  and because Apple pay close attention to performance in runtime  they want to give you a way to make your app run with the best possible performance   Update   Getting back to this answer after 4 years  as I got the highest reputations from it in Stackoverflow    I misunderstood a little the meaning of unwrapping at that time  Now after 4 years I believe the meaning of unwrapping here is to expand the code from its original compact form  Also it means removing the vagueness around that object  as we are not sure by definition if it is nil or not  Just like the answer of Ashley above  think about it as a present which could contain nothing in it  But I still think that the unwrapping is code unwrapping and not memory based unwrapping as using enum

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In Short      After you have declare a variable and that you are certain the variable is holding a value   let assumedString  String     Some message     let implicitString  String   assumedString   else you would have to do this on every after passing value     let possibleString  String     An optional string   let forcedString  String   possibleString     requires an exclamation mark

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ASK YOURSELF  Does the type person  have an apartment member property   OR Does the type person have an apartment member property   If you can t answer this question  then continue reading  To understand you may need super-basic level of understanding of Generics  See here  A lot of things in Swift are written using Generics  Optionals included The code below has been made available from this Stanford video  Highly recommend you to watch the first 5 minutes An Optional is an enum with only 2 cases enum Optional lt T gt       case None     case Some T     let x  String    nil   actually means   let x   Optional lt String gt  None   let x  String     quot hello quot    actually means   let x   Optional lt String gt  Some  quot hello quot     var y   x     actually means   switch x   case  Some let value   y   value case  None     Raise an exception    Optional binding  let x String    something if let y   x          do something with y     Actually means   switch x  case  Some let y   print  y     or whatever else you like using  case  None  break    when you say var john  Person  You actually mean such  enum Optional lt Person gt   case  None case  Some Person     Does the above enum have any property named apartment  Do you see it anywhere  It s not there at all  However if you unwrap it ie do person  then you can     what it does under the hood is   Optional lt Person gt  Some Person name   quot John Appleseed quot     Had you defined var john  Person instead of  var john  Person  then you would have no longer needed to have the   used  because Person itself does have a member of apartment  As a future discussion on why using   to unwrap is sometimes not recommended see this Q amp A

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John is an optional Person  meaning it can hold a value or be nil    john apartment   number73   is used if john is not an optional  Since john is never nil we can be sure it won t call apartment on a nil value  While  john  apartment   number73   promises the compiler that john is not nil then unwraps the optional to get john s value and accesses john s apartment property  Use this if you know that john is not nil  If you call this on a nil optional  you ll get a runtime error   The documentation includes a nice example for using this where convertedNumber is an optional   if convertedNumber       println    possibleNumber  has an integer value of   convertedNumber       else       println    possibleNumber  could not be converted to an integer

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In this case     var John  Person   it means  that initially John will have nil value  it will be set and once set will never be nil-led again  Therefore for convenience I can use the easier syntax for accessing an optional var because this is an  Implicitly unwrapped optional

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The entire story begins with a feature of swift called optional vars  These are the vars which may have a value or may not have a value  In general swift doesn t allow us to use a variable which isn t initialised  as this may lead to crashes or unexpected reasons and also server a placeholder for backdoors  Thus in order to declare a variable whose value isn t initially determined we use a       When such a variable is declared  to use it as a part of some expression one has to unwrap them before use  unwrapping is an operation through which value of a variable is discovered this applies to objects  Without unwrapping if you try to use them you will have compile time error  To unwrap a variable which is an optional var  exclamation mark     is used    Now there are times when you know that such optional variables will be assigned values by system for example or your own program but sometime later   for example UI outlets  in such situation instead of declaring an optional variable using a question mark     we use       Thus system knows that this variable which is declared with     is optional right now and has no value but will receive a value in later in its lifetime    Thus exclamation mark holds two different usages   1  To declare a variable which will be optional and will receive value definitely later  2  To unwrap an optional variable before using it in an expression   Above descriptions avoids too much of technical stuff  i hope

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If john were an optional var  declared thusly   var john  Person    then it would be possible for john to have no value  in ObjC parlance  nil value   The exclamation point basically tells the compiler  I know this has a value  you don t need to test for it   If you didn t want to use it  you could conditionally test for it   if let otherPerson   john       otherPerson apartment   number73     The interior of this will only evaluate if john has a value

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If you use it as an optional  it unwraps the optional and sees if something is there  If you use it in an if-else statement is is code for NOT  For example   if  myNumber    3       if myNumber is NOT 3 do whatever is inside these brackets

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Here are some examples   var name String    Hello World  var word String    Where word is an optional value  means it may or may not contain a value   word   name    Here name has a value so we can assign it  var cow String   nil var dog String    Where dog is forcefully unwrapped means it must contain a value  dog   cow   The application will crash because we are assign nil to unwrapped

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Simple the Optional variable allows nil to be stored   var str   String    nil  str    Data   To convert Optional to the Specific DataType  We unwrap the variable using the keyword      func get message   String      return    get message   str       Unwapped to pass as String

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IN SIMPLE WORDS  USING Exclamation mark indicates that variable must consists non nil value  it never be nil

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If you re familiar with C   this is like Nullable types which are also declared using a question mark   Person  thisPerson    And the exclamation mark in this case is equivalent to accessing the  Value property of the nullable type like this   thisPerson Value

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Some big picture perspective to add to the other useful but more detail-centric answers   In Swift  the exclamation point appears in several contexts    Forced unwrapping  let name   nameLabel  text Implicitly unwrapped optionals  var logo  UIImageView  Forced casting  logo image   thing as  UIImage Unhandled exceptions  try  NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData data        Every one of these is a different language construct with a different meaning  but they all have three important things in common   1  Exclamation points circumvent Swift   s compile-time safety checks   When you use   in Swift  you are essentially saying     Hey  compiler  I know you think an error could happen here  but I know with total certainty that it never will      Not all valid code fits into the box of Swift   s compile-time type system     or any language   s static  type checking  for that matter  There are situations where you can logically prove that an error will never happen  but you can   t prove it to the compiler  That   s why Swift   s designers added these features in the first place   However  whenever you use    you   re ruling out having a recovery path for an error  which means that     2  Exclamation points are potential crashes   An exclamation point also says     Hey Swift  I am so certain that this error can never happen that it   s better for you to crash my whole app than it is for me to code a recovery path for it      That   s a dangerous assertion  It can be the correct one  in mission-critical code where you have thought hard about your code   s invariants  it may be that bogus output is worse than a crash   However  when I see   in the wild  it s rarely used so mindfully  Instead  it too often means     this value was optional and I didn   t really think too hard about why it could be nil or how to properly handle that situation  but adding   made it compile     so my code is correct  right      Beware the arrogance of the exclamation point  Instead     3  Exclamation points are best used sparingly   Every one of these   constructs has a   counterpart that forces you to deal with the error nil case    Conditional unwrapping  if let name   nameLabel  text         Optionals  var logo  UIImageView  Conditional casts  logo image   thing as  UIImage Nil-on-failure exceptions  try  NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData data        If you are tempted to use    it is always good to consider carefully why you are not using   instead  Is crashing your program really the best option if the   operation fails  Why is that value optional failable   Is there a reasonable recovery path your code could take in the nil error case  If so  code it   If it can   t possibly be nil  if the error can never happen  then is there a reasonable way to rework your logic so that the compiler knows that  If so  do it  your code will be less error-prone   There are times when there is no reasonable way to handle an error  and simply ignoring the error     and thus proceeding with wrong data     would be worse than crashing  Those are the times to use force unwrapping   I periodically search my entire codebase for   and audit every use of it  Very few usages stand up to scrutiny   As of this writing  the entire Siesta framework has exactly two instances of it    That   s not to say you should never use   in your code     just that you should use it mindfully  and never make it the default option

[swift] What does an exclamation mark mean in the Swift language?

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