Question

Actually my question here is: are null and nil equivalent or not?

I have an example but I am confused when they are equal when they are not.

NSNull *nullValue = [NSNull null];
NSArray *arrayWithNull = [NSArray arrayWithObject:nullValue];
NSLog(@"arrayWithNull: %@", arrayWithNull);
id aValue = [arrayWithNull objectAtIndex:0];

if (aValue == nil) {
    NSLog(@"equals nil");
} else if (aValue == [NSNull null]) {
    NSLog(@"equals NSNull instance");
    if ([aValue isEqual:nil]) {
        NSLog(@"isEqual:nil");
    }
}

Here in the above case it shows that both null and nil are not equal and it displays “equals NSNull instance”

NSString *str=NULL;
id str1=nil;
if(str1 == str)
{
   printf("\n IS EQUAL........");

}
else
{
    printf("\n NOT EQUAL........");
}

And in the second case it shows both are equal and it displays “IS EQUAL”.

Anyone’s help will be much appreciated.

Thank you,
Monish.

Answer 1

nil and NULL are essentially the same, nil is something like (NSObject *)0, while NULL is more like (void *)0. But both are pointers with an integer value of zero. You can send messages to nil without raising an error.

NSNull and NULL (or nil, of course) are different things, however. You just use NSNull as a helper to add an empty object to an NSArray or another container class, since you can’t add nil to them. So instead, you use [NSNull null] as a replacement, and you have to check if an array element is NSNull, not if it’s nil (it will never be equal to nil).