Kotlin - Nullable Types and Null Safety

Kotlin support Null safety, that means we can declare a varible can hold null value or not.
By supporting of this null safety compiler can detect the NullPointer Exception errors at compile time.
This reduce the NullPointer Exceptions at run time.

All varibles in Kotlin are null safety, when we try to declare varibale with null vale will throw error at compile time



var intro: String = "Hello, World"
    intro = null // Compilation Error

    so if want to allow null valu for the variable we need to declare the variable like below

var intro: String? = "Hello, World"
     intro = null
 

We know NullPointer exceptions will occure when we accessing the null variables.
Kotlin not allow accessing the Methods or property on nullable variables.

Nullable Types in Kotlin

Kotlin provides the below ways to access the null varaibles.


Checking the Null condition


    var str:String="Kotlin"

     if(str!=null){
        println("Welcome to $str")
     }else
     {
        println("Welcome to Guest")
     }

    Output : Welcome to Kotlin
 

Safe Operator ?
By define the variable with ? operator


        var str:String?="Kotlin"
        str=null
        str?.length

        output :  null

        is same as

        if(str!=null)
        {
            println(str.length)
        }
        else
        {
            println(null)
        }
        if we want to execute the statement only if the variable non null then we have to use let.

        var str:String?=null

        str?.let{ println(str.length) }

        //Prints Nothing

        The above expression will execute only the str value is not null


        If we want to provide default value when the varoibale get null,
        to get the default value we need define statement like below
        var len=str.lenth ?: 0

 

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