What does .text and the dot mean in Swift?

Question

Created Jan ’18

Replies 2

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I am currently coding my own app and I was looking at a coding video for help and the person in the video was using .text and some other things that had dots in front of them like .color and .shape, which were variables declared and initialized already. I was wondering if anybody has a clear definition on what the .text means or what it does and what the overall dot means whenever you use it.

Thanks to anybody who has a solution!

Answer 1

KMT OP

Jan ’18

'dot syntax' allows you to access properties; started with Obj-C

See:

• Dot Syntax Is a Concise Alternative to Accessor Method Calls

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1573278/when-to-use-brackets-and-when-to-use-the-period-in-objective-c

'text' or 'color' is simply a name assigned to that property.

Answer 2

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Jan ’18

KMT is correct in that dot syntax is used to access properties. For example, if you have a

UITextField

called

myTextField

and code like this:

myTextField.textColor = UIColor.red

then:

The first dot tells Swift that you’re assigning to the
```
textColor
```
property of the
```
myTextField
```
object
The second dot says that you’re getting the
```
red
```
property of the
```
UIColor
```
class.

The situation with leading dots is more nuanced. You can rewrite the above line as:

myTextField.textColor = .red

In this case the

UIColor

can be omitted because Swift can infer that from the context. It knows that you’re assigning to

textColor

, which is a

UIColor

, and then

.red

refers to

UIColor.red

.

If you have any other cases that you still don’t understand, please post some code snippets and we can take things from there.

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