What is the Equatable Protocol in Swift?

Inspect your custom objects for equality

Photo by Benjamin Wong on Unsplash

Today we will learn about a protocol that provides a clear way to find out if your custom objects are equal.

Without further ado, let’s explore Equatable protocol in practice.

Let’s Start

Say we have simple struct called StudentsBook:

But how can we make sure it’s the right student? In order to compare instances for equality we need to:

• Adopt Equatable protocol
• Provide an implementation for the == operator. Simply add a static == func that takes lhs (left-hand side) and rhs (right-hand side) parameters and returns a Bool that decides whether the two sides are equal or not.

By doing this, we’ve compared all instances and get a pure result.

However, in certain cases, there are requirements of a protocol that can be autogenerated for you. You only specify the name of protocol and don’t write == method on your own. The Swift compiler will autogenerate the implementation just by looking at data types.

Wrapping up

This is all you should know about Equatable protocol. I hope it was interesting!

Interested in other relative protocols? Feel free to visit my other relevant articles:

• Creating your own Protocols in Swift
• What is Codable Protocol in Swift?
• What is Comparable Protocol in Swift?
• What Is the CustomStringConvertible Protocol in Swift?

If you have any criticism, question, or suggestion, feel free to post them in the comment section below!

Thanks for reading.