I know there are tons of stack overflow pages out there that explain how to do this but everytime I take the code from here and put it in i get the same error and that error
Alternatively you can also use:
Swift 3:
if (textField.text.characters.count > 0) { print("text field not empty") } else { print("text field empty") }
Swift 4.x and above:
if (textField.text.count > 0) { print("text field not empty") } else { print("text field empty") }