Adding forEach() to Swift Arrays

Ben

I’ve been working on a small project in Swift recently. It’s been both fun and amazingly frustrating at turns. Moving from a language which I’ve been using for 13+ years to one that I’ve only known about for 3 months is hard.

One of the things I’m not used to yet is a base object set that isn’t as full featured as Foundation’s. This isn’t a nock against Swift, just an obvious difference that I think will change with time. Swift has also been built such that it’s quite a bit easier and more acceptable to add basic functionality to these standard library types. However, for me always remembering that I can do this is the trick.

Today I was wanting the functionality provided by NSArray’s
-makeObjectsPerformSelector: method. I could have just briged the Swift array I was working with into an NSArray and called the method, but I felt like it might be nice to try extending Array instead. This is what I came up with:

extension Array {
	func forEach(doThis: (element: T) -> Void) {
		for e in self {
			doThis(element: e)
		}
	}
}

Wow. That was easy! Code to use it simply looks like:

someArray.forEach { element in 
	// do something with the element
}

Being able to make this kind of simple extension to a low level type and having it just work makes me a little more open to the idea of Generics invading our little corner of the software development world.

SwiftCode