Long chains of property accesses in JavaScript can be error-prone, as any of them might evaluate to null or undefined (also known as “nullish” values). Checking for property existence on each step easily turns into a deeply-nested structure of if -statements or a long if -condition replicating the property access chain:



const nameLength = db . user . name . length ;





let nameLength ;

if ( db && db . user && db . user . name )

nameLength = db . user . name . length ;

The above can also be expressed using the ternary operator, which doesn’t exactly help readability:

const nameLength =

( db

? ( db . user

? ( db . user . name

? db . user . name . length

: undefined )

: undefined )

: undefined ) ;

Introducing the optional chaining operator #

Surely you don’t want to write code like that, so having some alternative is desirable. Some other languages offer an elegant solution to this problem with using a feature called “optional chaining”. According to a recent spec proposal, “an optional chain is a chain of one or more property accesses and function calls, the first of which begins with the token ?. ”.

Using the new optional chaining operator, we can rewrite the above example as follows:



const nameLength = db ?. user ?. name ?. length ;

What happens when db , user , or name is undefined or null ? With the optional chaining operator, JavaScript initializes nameLength to undefined instead of throwing an error.

Notice that this behavior is also more robust than our check for if (db && db.user && db.user.name) . For instance, what if name was always guaranteed to be a string? We could change name?.length to name.length . Then, if name were an empty string, we would still get the correct 0 length. That is because the empty string is a falsy value: it behaves like false in an if clause. The optional chaining operator fixes this common source of bugs.

Additional syntax forms: calls and dynamic properties #

There’s also a version of the operator for calling optional methods:





const adminOption = db ?. user ?. validateAdminAndGetPrefs ?. ( ) . option ;

The syntax can feel unexpected, as the ?.() is the actual operator, which applies to the expression before it.

There’s a third usage of the operator, namely the optional dynamic property access, which is done via ?.[] . It either returns the value referenced by the argument in the brackets, or undefined if there’s no object to get the value from. Here’s a possible use case, following the example from above:





const optionName = 'optional setting' ;

const optionLength = db ?. user ?. preferences ?. [ optionName ] . length ;

This last form is also available for optionally indexing arrays, e.g.:





const userIndex = 42 ;

const userName = usersArray ?. [ userIndex ] . name ;

The optional chaining operator can be combined with the nullish coalescing ?? operator when a non- undefined default value is needed. This enables safe deep property access with a specified default value, addressing a common use case that previously required userland libraries such as lodash’s _.get :

const object = { id : 123 , names : { first : 'Alice' , last : 'Smith' } } ;



{

const firstName = _ . get ( object , 'names.first' ) ;





const middleName = _ . get ( object , 'names.middle' , '(no middle name)' ) ;



}



{

const firstName = object ?. names ?. first ?? '(no first name)' ;





const middleName = object ?. names ?. middle ?? '(no middle name)' ;



}

Properties of the optional chaining operator #

The optional chaining operator has a few interesting properties: short-circuiting, stacking, and optional deletion. Let’s walk through each of these with an example.

Short-circuiting means not evaluating the rest of the expression if an optional chaining operator returns early:



db ?. user ?. grow ( ++ age ) ;

Stacking means that more than one optional chaining operator can be applied on a sequence of property accesses:



const firstNameLength = db . users ?. [ 42 ] ?. names . first . length ;

Still, be considerate about using more than one optional chaining operator in a single chain. If a value is guaranteed to not be nullish, then using ?. to access properties on it is discouraged. In the example above, db is considered to always be defined, but db.users and db.users[42] may not be. If there’s such a user in the database, then names.first.length is assumed to always be defined.

Optional deletion means that the delete operator can be combined with an optional chain:



delete db ?. user ;

More details can be found in the Semantics section of the proposal.

Support for optional chaining #