Advanced Pattern Matching

Type Casting Pattern

released Fri, 15 Feb 2019
Swift Version 5.0

Type Casting Pattern

As the name already implies, this pattern casts or matches types. It has two different keywords:

  • is type: Matches the runtime type (or a subclass of it) against the right hand side. This performs a type cast but disregards the returned type. So your case block won't know about the matched type.
  • pattern as type: Performs the same match as the is pattern but for a successful match casts the type into the pattern specified on the left hand side.

Here is an example of the two.

let a: Any = 5 

switch a {



// this fails because a is still Any

// error: binary operator '+' cannot be applied to operands of type 'Any' and 'Int'

case is Int: print (a + 1)



// This works and returns '6'

case let n as Int: print (n + 1)



default: ()

}

Note that there is no pattern before the is. It matches directly against a.