On Thursday, 14 January 2021 at 18:24:44 UTC, ddcovery wrote:
This is only an open question to know what code patterns you usually use to solve this situation in D:
I'm almost never in this situation except for reading things like xml or json data that may be missing.
So I just special cased those. My json lib doesn't return null per se, it returns var(null) which is allowed to just return more harmless nulls. Thus you write `person.father.father.name.get!string` and it will be empty if anything was null in the chain.
With dom, you can optionSelector("person > father > father > name").innerText and again if the selector returned null, all its methods also just return empty strings or whatever.
So the library handles these special cases and then I don't worry about nested nulls anywhere else since I consider it bad style to even be in that situation in the first place.
