How to check for null or false in Scala concisely?

Question

In Groovy language, it is very simple to check for null or false like:

groovy code:

def some = getSomething()
if(some) {
//         


        

Answer 1

Using pattern matching as suggested in a couple of answers here is a nice approach:

val some = Option(getSomething())
  some match {
    case Some(theValue) => doSomethingWith(theValue)
    case None           => println("Whoops, didn't get anything useful back")
  }

But, a bit verbose.

I prefer to map an Option in the following way:

Option(getSomething()) map (something -> doSomethingWith(something))

One liner, short, clear.

The reason to that is Option can be viewed as some kind of collection – some special snowflake of a collection that contains either zero elements or exactly one element of a type and as as you can map a List[A] to a List[B], you can map an Option[A] to an Option[B]. This means that if your instance of Option[A] is defined, i.e. it is Some[A], the result is Some[B], otherwise it is None. It's really powerful!