Why does UILabel.text result in “fatal error: unexpectedly found nil while unwrapping an Optional value”?

Question

I've read several answers to this question and have tried all recommendations with no success. I'm fairly new to swift and am building an app with Swift, PHP and MySQL. I'm receiving the error after the user has logged in to the app and the system should be displaying the username via a label using UILabel.text. The error is occurring on setting a value to the UILabel.text variable. My code is included below. I've tried to hardcode values on other pages and am getting this error throughout my project.

import UIKit

class HomeViewController: UITabBarController {

    @IBOutlet var usernameLbl: UILabel!

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()

        // set global variables
        let username = (user!["username"] as AnyObject).uppercased

        // label values
        print(usernameLbl ?? username!)
        usernameLbl.text = username
    }
}

I'm accessing the HomeViewController programmatically. The app uses a tab bar and the first page of it is Home. The code is from a course I'm taking on Udemy. Here is how I'm accessing Home:

// func to pass to home page or to tabBar
func login() {

    // refer to our Main.storyboard
    let storyboard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: nil)

    // store our tabBar Object from Main.storyboard in tabBar var
    let tabBar = storyboard.instantiateViewController(withIdentifier: "tabBar")

    // present tabBar that is storing in tabBar var
    window?.rootViewController = tabBar

}

Solution 1

Seeing an @IBOutlet on a UITabBarController is very suspicious. You generally have a tab bar controller which presents child UIViewController subclasses, and put labels on those child view controllers, not the tab bar controller. A tab bar controller does not generally have IBOutlet references. The child view controllers would have them.

Double check to which class you've connected that @IBOutlet and confirm whether it's a subclass of UIViewController or UITabBarController.

Solution 2

You might want to follow best practices and avoid the use of ! as much as possible.

The error you've got happens when you try to access a value or reference stored in an optional that does not contain any value (i.e., it is nil).

In your case, if usernameLbl is nil, usernameLbl.text will crash your app (Think "null pointer exception" in Java, perhaps?).

It is very common to define outlests as:

@IBOutlet weak var label: UILabel!

...instead of the safer:

@IBOutlet weak var label: UILabel?

...because the first one allows you to access its properties without using the ? (i.e. label.text vs. label?.text). But there's an implicit assumption that the label is not nil: the ! by itself does nothing to prevent this (it only silences the compiler, telling it "I know what I'm doing, trust me!").

That shouldn't be a problem as long as you only access it after viewDidLoad() and your outlets are proerly connected in Interface Builder/storyboard, because in that case it will be guaranteed to not be nil.

My guess is that you forgot to hook up the outlet to your label.

Here is a tutorial on storyboards in case it helps.

---

The whole reason outlets need to be defined as optionals (implicitly unwrapped ! or "standard" ?) is that in Swift, all properties must have a value by the time the instance is initialized (actually, even before calling the super class initializer if that applies).

For view controllers, instance initialization happens before the subviews can be initialized and assigned to the properties/outlets. That happens in the method loadView(), which is called lazily (only just before the view is actually needed for display). So by making all subviews optional (and variable, not constant), they can have the temporary "value" of nil by the time the initializer completes execution (thus satisfying Swift's rules).

---

Edit: If your outlet is still nil at runtime even though it is connected in interface builder, you can at least try to intercept any code resetting it and see what's going on, with a property observer:

@IBOutlet weak var label: UILabel! {
    didSet {
        if label == nil {
            print("Label set to nil!") 
            // ^ SET A BREAKPOINT IN THIS LINE
        }
    }
}

Solution 3

Think of the ! operator as the "crash if nil" operator. It's actually called the "force unwrap" operator, and is used to "unwrap" an Optional. If the optional contains a nil, it triggers the same error as trying to dereference a null pointer in other languages.

You should avoid the ! operator until you really understand what it does.

IB (Interface Builder) sets up outlets as force-unwrapped so that you can reference them without having to constantly check them for nil. The idea is that your outlets should never be nil, and if they are it's a problem and you WANT to crash. Think of it as a fuse. It triggers an obvious, early failure that's easy to find and fix.

Having a broken outlet (or missing IBAction) is one of the easiest mistakes to make. With an outlet declared as

@IBOutlet var someOutlet: UILabel!

The compiler lets you reference it without unwrapping it, but you will crash if the outlet is nil.

You can avoid the force-unwrap by adding a ? after the outlet name, or using and if let or a guard statement.

However, with outlets, the thing to do is to realize you've got a broken outlet and just fix it. Then your code works fine.

To fix a broken outlet, control-drag from IB to the @IBoutlet declaration in your code. Think of it as hooking up a cable in your entertainment system.

When you declare an outlet in your code the editor puts a little open circle in the margin to the left of the @IBOutlet declaration. When the outlet is connected, the editor shows a filled-in circle, so it's easy to see if an outlet is connected or not. (Same with @IBAction methods.)