Optionals

Optionals are not functional interfaces, but nifty utilities to prevent NullPointerException. It’s an important concept for the next section, so let’s have a quick look at how Optionals work.

Optional is a simple container for a value which may be null or non-null. Think of a method which may return a non-null result but sometimes return nothing. Instead of returning null you return an Optional in Java 8.

Optional<String> optional = Optional.of("bam");
optional.isPresent();           // true
optional.get();                 // "bam"
optional.orElse("fallback");    // "bam"
optional.ifPresent((s) -> System.out.println(s.charAt(0)));     // "b"