Kotlin Null Safety

Kotlin’s type system is aimed to eliminate NullPointerException’s from our code. The only possible causes of NPE’s may be

1. An explicit call to throw NullPointerException()
2. Usage of the !! operator that is described below
3. External Java code has caused it
4. There’s some data inconsistency with regard to initialization (an uninitialized this available in a constructor is used somewhere)

Variables

As mentioned above, there’re the only 4 ways to cause a NPE. And there’re nullable and non-nullable types in Kotlin’s System. So when you define a variable, you must tell Kotlin whether the variable is nullable or not.

1. Non-nullable variable You can define non-nullable variables as following:

        var b:String = "abc"
        var a:Int = 10
   

   Once you want to assign a null to a non-nullable variable,

        b = null
        a = null
   

   the compiler will throw you an error. The Kotlin system prevent nullable value in the compile stage.

2. Nullable variable If you want to define a variable which can be set as null, please code as following.

        var b:String? = "abc"
        var a:Int? = 10
   

   Now both of them can be set as null

        b = null    // ok
        a = null    // ok
   

Nullable check

The Kotlin system will tell you an error if you want to call a method from a nullable variable.

    b.length.  // compile error

You must check b whether it is null or not.

    if (b != null) {
        b.length
    }

It’s a Java style way, is there a new method to handle this in Kotlin. Absolutely, yes. There’s a new and safe operator, ?., to be used in this state.

    val a = b?.length

It’s safe and never throws the NullPointerException. It will return a null for this invocation and never really call the length method. Isn’t a easy way to handle nullable variable?

If you want the Java’s style to handle exception, just use !!.

  val a = b!!.length

The above code may throws a NullPointerException during the runtime.

There’s also another example from kotlin’s official site:

Safe calls are useful in chains. For example, if Bob, an Employee, may be assigned to a Department (or not), that in turn may have another Employee as a department head, then to obtain the name of Bob’s department head (if any), we write the following:

bob?.department?.head?.name

Such a chain returns a null if any of the properties in it is null.

To perform a certain operation only for non-null values, you can use the safe call operator together with let:

val listWithNulls: List<String?> = listOf("A", null)
for (item in listWithNulls) {
     item?.let { println(it) } // prints A and ignores null
}

Elvis Operator (?:)

You definitely meet the following issue: return the string’s length if non-null and just return -1 when it’s null

    val l: Int = if (b != null) b.length else -1

Now there’s new operator.

    val l = b?.length ?: -1

or

    bob?.department?.head?.name ?: "No Name"

If the expression to the left of ?: is not null, the elvis operator returns it, otherwise it returns the expression to the right. Note that the right-hand side expression is evaluated only if the left-hand side is null.

Note that, since throw and return are expressions in Kotlin, they can also be used on the right hand side of the elvis operator. This can be very handy, for example, for checking function arguments:

fun foo(node: Node): String? {
    val parent = node.getParent() ?: return null
    val name = node.getName() ?: throw IllegalArgumentException("name expected")
    // ...
}

safe cast

Regular casts may result into a ClassCastException if the object is not of the target type. Another option is to use safe casts that return null if the attempt was not successful:

val a = Animal()
val dog: Dog? = a as? Dog

Collections of Nullable Type

If you have a collection of elements of a nullable type and want to filter non-null elements, you can do so by using filterNotNull.

val nullableList: List<Int?> = listOf(1, 2, null, 4)
val intList: List<Int> = nullableList.filterNotNull()