Providing a default value for an Optional in Swift?

Update

Apple has now added a coalescing operator:

var unwrappedValue = optionalValue ?? defaultValue

---

The ternary operator is your friend in this case

var unwrappedValue = optionalValue ? optionalValue! : defaultValue

You could also provide your own extension for the Optional enum:

extension Optional {
    func or(defaultValue: T) -> T {
        switch(self) {
            case .None:
                return defaultValue
            case .Some(let value):
                return value
        }
    }
}

Then you can just do:

optionalValue.or(defaultValue)

However, I recommend sticking to the ternary operator as other developers will understand that much more quickly without having to investigate the or method

Note: I started a module to add common helpers like this or on Optional to swift.

As of Aug 2014 Swift has coalescing operator (??) that allows that. For example, for an optional String myOptional you could write:

result = myOptional ?? "n/a"