Structs in Swift for Newbies
In this article I will be discussing Structs in Swift.
Classes and structures are general-purpose, flexible constructs that become the building blocks of your program’s code. You define properties and methods to add functionality to your classes and structures by using exactly the same syntax as for constants, variables, and functions.
— Apple Documentation
In simple terms, a struct is like a custom data type which provides storage of data using properties with extended functionality using methods.
Let’s take a look at how a struct’s syntax looks like.
As you see, we define it with the struct followed by a name of the struct then open braces then close braces.
Inside the braces is where your properties go. Properties are like attributes of the struct.
For example we could have a User struct where it’s properties are username, email, and name.
I think the best way to show what structs are is to start using them.
Open playground.
Let’s use the User example.
Now that we have defined our struct with properties we can now create an instance of it.
To read a property you simply do this:
Value Type
It’s important to know the difference between value and reference types.
Structs are value type, meaning it’s value is copied when assigned or passed.
Hopefully this example will make sense.
Let’s create another instance of User, call it user2.
Create a variable user3 and make it equal to user2.
Now let’s manipulate user3’s username.
To see what I’m talking about let’s print out both usernames of user2 and user3.
As you see we copied user2 to user3, then we changed user2’s username.
When we print, you can see that user3 does not change.
If you don’t understand my example take a look at Apple’s.
Functions inside structs
We can also have functions inside structs like so:
To call this function we use person variable.
That’s the gist.
Thanks for checking out Structs!
Any suggestions on future articles or comments feel free to let me know!
Most likely I will be covering Classes next 😊 .
