Programming in Dart: Fundamentals

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In Dart 2021, Dart was upgraded with a huge feature that would affect every single line of code in Dart, and that was null safety. It was a huge upgrade, and it really comes into play when working with collections. So what is null safety? What is being null? Null means the absence of a value. Let's say you're a teacher writing some code for tracking grades. You may create a quiz, but how do you know that a student has actually taken the quiz? Well, you could set the value of the quiz to zero, but that's an actual grade. So you may next choose a negative number, like negative one. But what if your data store doesn't accept negative numbers? After all, you can't actually have a negative grade. You could solve this problem in a variety of ways, but with null, it's already solved for you. Null means nothing. Instead of putting in a strange grade, you simply put null, which means the quiz wasn't taken. Now, so far in this course, we haven't run into null, and that's because, by default, all variables contain a value. So in the case of a variable containing a null value, we have to let Dart know about it. We do this with the question mark. We simply write the type with a question mark after it. So here I am defining strings for my first name and my last name, but here is a string for the suffix. Now, here's the thing with a suffix variable. It may or may not contain a variable. It will either contain a string or it will be null. This means you just can't use it like you did with other variables. If you perform an operation on a null value, the program will crash. This means you have to take account for null values. One way we can do this is with an if statement. We simply check to see if the suffix is null. If it isn't null, we can actually access the value like we normally do. Other times, we can access a null value, and if we encounter a null value, we can put a default value. For this, we use the if-null operator. The if-null operator returns the unwrapped value, otherwise we can put a default value. In this case, we return a suffix, but if there was no suffix, we simply return an empty string. Let's play around with null values when working with a list. To get started, open up DartPad. We're going to create a list of grades like we did in a previous challenge, except this time we'll create a new list that contains null values. We're going to use a constructor. A constructor is a special way to create objects. In this case, we'll use the empty constructor, indicating that the list is growable. You'll learn about constructors in a later course. We've defined a list that contains knowable values. Let's add some grades. In this case, the student scored 100 for their first test, missed their second test, and scored an 84 for the final test. Now let's add all the values together. First, we create a new total variable. Now let's get the first value. We'll store that in a variable. This stores the possible null result in a variable. We can't access the variable without unwrapping it. For example, if we add it to the total variable, we get an error. We have to unwrap the value. We will do this in an if statement. Let's delete the error. Now let's unwrap the value and add it to the total variable. Now let's get second test. It's a null result, which means we'll default it to a zero. Let's add it. In this case, we add a zero to the total, and we don't have to create another variable to unwrap. Now, there is another way to unwrap the value. There is another way to unwrap a value, but this is a very dangerous method, like playing with electric cables. In this case, we put an exclamation mark, known as the assertion operator, after a null variable, and it automatically unwraps the value for us. Awesome, right? But what happens if the variable contains a null value and you try to unwrap that value? Well, it's going to crash your program. This means you should only use this when you are absolutely sure that the variable contains a value. This means, in practical terms, you will only be using this operator in a very small amount of situations. Okay, let's access the value for the last test. We're going to unwrap it using the exclamation mark. This returns the current value, but keep in mind, this is a dangerous operation. If the variable actually contains a null value, then you will crash your program. You should only use it when you know that the variable contains a value. Now we get the average. Now for giggles, let's set our last test to null. When we run our program, we run into an error. In short, always be careful using the exclamation mark. Believe it or not, there are even more ways to unwrap a null value. Dart provides a whole ton of them which you can check out in the author notes. Instead of barraging you with the options, I'll share new ones as we come into them. Just note, if you are coming from a language like Swift and you are a curious for the equivalents for unwrapping nulls, Dart has them in spades. For instance, if you check for a null value in a function and return out of it, that's the Dart equivalent of the guard statement. Again, see the official documentation for more information.