Swift - Checking unmanaged address book single value property for nil

Question

I\'m relative new to iOS-Development and swift. But up to this point I was always able to help myself by some research on stackoverflow and several documentations and tutori

Answer 1

If I want the values associated with various properties, I use the following syntax:

let first = ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonFirstNameProperty)?.takeRetainedValue() as? String
let last  = ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonLastNameProperty)?.takeRetainedValue() as? String

Or you can use optional binding:

if let first = ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonFirstNameProperty)?.takeRetainedValue() as? String {
    // use `first` here
}
if let last  = ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonLastNameProperty)?.takeRetainedValue() as? String {
    // use `last` here
}

If you really want to return a non-optional, where missing value is a zero length string, you can use the ?? operator:

let first = ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonFirstNameProperty)?.takeRetainedValue() as? String ?? ""
let last  = ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonLastNameProperty)?.takeRetainedValue() as? String ?? ""