[swift-evolution] Why does URL.checkResourceIsReachable() return a Bool?

[Kevin Ballard]

Well that's curious. I tested in the REPL for URL(fileURLWithPath:
"/foo/bar") and it simply returned false, but running the script does
throw an error. And doubly-weird, if I go back to the REPL and prefix
the call with `try?` the value becomes nil instead of false. So that's
pretty confusing.

It definitely seems like this method should behave differently than it
does today. My suggestion would be to replace it with something like

func checkResourceIsReachable() -> (Bool, Error?)

This best approximates the Obj-C behavior where you can just use the
return value if you don't care about the reason why it's not reachable,
and you can inspect the error if you do care.

-Kevin Ballard

On Mon, Aug 8, 2016, at 03:13 PM, Charles Srstka wrote:
>> On Aug 8, 2016, at 4:32 PM, Kevin Ballard <kevin at sb.org> wrote:
>>
>> The documentation is wrong (for Swift).
>>
>> For file URLs, this method returns true/false without throwing an
>> error (at least, if the file doesn't exist there's no error; I don't
>> know if there are conditions that would cause an error to be
>> returned).
>>
>> For non-file URLs this method throws an error.
>>
>> The bit about "For other URL types, false is returned" is written for
>> Obj-C, where you can completely disregard the error. You can't
>> disregard the error in Swift, so it doesn't apply (though you can use
>> try? and treat a nil value the same as false)
>
> In my testing, this does not appear to be correct; it actually seems
> to throw an error in both cases. For a file URL pointing to a file
> that doesn’t exist, it throws NSFileReadNoSuchFileError, and for an
> HTTP URL, it throws NSFileNoSuchFileError. This further causes me to
> question the purpose of having the method return a boolean.
>
> Here’s the code:
>
> import Foundation
>
> let fileURL = URL(fileURLWithPath: "/asdfasdfasdf")
> let httpURL = URL(string: "http://asdfasdfasdf.com/asdfasdfasdf")!
>
> do {
>  if try fileURL.checkResourceIsReachable() {
>  print("file URL is reachable")
>     } else {
>  print("file URL returned false")
>     }
> } catch {
>  print("file URL threw error: \(error)")
> }
>
> do {
>  if try httpURL.checkResourceIsReachable() {
>  print("http URL is reachable")
>     } else {
>  print("http URL returned false")
>     }
> } catch {
>  print("http URL threw error: \(error)")
> }
>
>
> And the output:
>
> *file URL threw error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=260 "The
> file “asdfasdfasdf” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file."
> UserInfo={NSURL=file:///asdfasdfasdf, NSFilePath=/asdfasdfasdf,
> NSUnderlyingError=0x100903eb0 {Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=2
> "No such file or directory"}}*
> *http URL threw error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4 "The
> file doesn’t exist."*
> *Program ended with exit code: 0*
> **
> Charles
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