Learning Swift™ Programming

Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals

Sometimes you want to create an optional that gets unwrapped automatically. To do this, you assign the type with an exclamation point instead of a question mark:

Click here to view code image

var hasSomething:String! = "Hey there"// implicitly unwrapped optional stringhasSomething // print the implicitly unwrapped optional and get the   unwrapped value.

You can think of implicitly unwrapped optionals as a present that unwraps itself. You should not use an implicitly unwrapped optional if a chance exists that it may contain nil at any point. You can still use implicitly unwrapped optionals in value binding to check their values.

So why should you create implicitly unwrapped optionals in the first place if they can ...