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by saagarjha 2460 days ago
What should you do when URL(string:) returns nil?
3 comments
RandallBrown 2460 days ago
Obviously it depends heavily on what you're doing in your app and where that string is coming from.

Is it a hard coded string that will never change? Force unwrapping is probably appropriate.

Is it based on user input? Then you should probably tell the user the string they entered isn't a URL.

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saagarjha 2460 days ago
Right, and in that case it's pretty clear how errors can occur and what you should do to handle it.
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swatcoder 2460 days ago
That's contextual. Maybe some combination of:

- abort and unwind the current action

- retry something

- log something

- abort the app explicitly

- fallback to a different value

- comment why this is a known-possible failure state

- present a message to the user

...

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untog 2460 days ago
The one time you should unwrap it is if it's a constant - that way the app will always immediately crash if it's nil. Pretty difficult to not run into a bug like that.

But if you're creating it dynamically you should be guarding and throwing an error.

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