Null safety

Working with nulls

A variable that doesn't refer to anything refers to null (or you can say that the variable "is null"). As opposed to None in Python, null is not an object - it's just a keyword that is used to make a variable refer to nothing or to check if it does (that check must be performed with == or !=). Because nulls are a frequent source of programming errors, Kotlin encourages avoiding them as much as possible - a variable cannot actually be null unless it's been declared to allow for null, which you do by suffixing the type name with ?. For example:

fun test(a: String, b: String?) {
}

The compiler will allow this function to be called as e.g. test("a", "b") or test("a", null), but not as test(null, "b") or test(null, null). Calling test(a, b) is only allowed if the compiler can prove that a cannot possibly be null. Inside of test, the compiler will not allow you to do anything with b that would result in an exception if b should happen to be null - so you can do a.length, but not b.length. However, once you're inside a conditional where you have checked that b is not null, you can do it:

if (b != null) {
    println(b.length)
}

Or:

if (b == null) {
    // Can't use members of b in here
} else {
    println(b.length)
}

Making frequent null checks is annoying, so if you have to allow for the possibility of nulls, there are several very useful operators in Kotlin to ease working with values that might be null, as described below.

Safe call operator

x?.y evaluates x, and if it is not null, it evaluates x.y (without reevaluating x), whose result becomes the result of the expression - otherwise, you get null. This also works for functions, and it can be chained - for example, x?.y()?.z?.w() will return null if any of x, x.y(), or x.y().z produce null; otherwise, it will return the result of x.y().z.w().

Elvis operator

x ?: y evaluates x, which becomes the result of the expression unless it's null, in which case you'll get y instead (which ought to be of a non-nullable type). This is also known as the "Elvis operator". You can even use it to perform an early return in case of null:

val z = x ?: return y

This will assign x to z if x is non-null, but if it is null, the entire function that contains this expression will stop and return y (this works because return is also an expression, and if it is evaluated, it evaluates its argument and then makes the containing function return the result).

Not-null assertion operator

Sometimes, you're in a situation where you have a value x that you know is not null, but the compiler doesn't realize it. This can legitimately happen when you're interacting with Java code, but if it happens because your code's logic is more complicated than the compiler's ability to reason about it, you should probably restructure your code. If you can't convince the compiler, you can resort to saying x!! to form an expression that produces the value of x, but whose type is non-nullable:

val x: String? = javaFunctionThatYouKnowReturnsNonNull()
val y: String = x!!

It can of course be done as a single expression: val x = javaFunctionThatYouKnowReturnsNonNull()!!.

!! will will raise a NullPointerException if the value actually is null. So you could also use it if you really need to call a particular function and would rather have an exception if there's no object to call it on (maybeNull!!.importantFunction()), although a better solution (because an NPE isn't very informational) is this:

val y: String = x ?: throw SpecificException("Useful message")
y.importantFunction()

The above could also be a oneliner - and note that the compiler knows that because the throw will prevent y from coming into existence if x is null, y must be non-null if we reach the line below. Contrast this with x?.importantFunction(), which is a no-op if x is null.

This material was written by Aasmund Eldhuset; it is owned by Khan Academy and is licensed for use under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US. Please note that this is not a part of Khan Academy's official product offering.