Question

I’m trying to retrieve a boolean from a hashtable… my code looks something like this:

Hashtable h = new Hastable();

...

h["foo"] = true;

...

object o = h["foo"];
if( o == null ) { return false; }
if( o.GetType() != typeof(bool) ) { return false; }
return (bool)o;

In contrast I use something like this for objects

return h["foo"] as MyObject;

Is there a nicer solution for booleans?

Answer 1

Well, if a Hashtable must be used (or the data is typed object for other reasons), consider:

object obj = true;
bool b = (obj as bool?) ?? false;
// b -> true

And:

object obj = "hello";
bool b = (obj as bool?) ?? false;
// b -> false

That is, bool? (or Nullable<bool>) is happy being an as target (because null is a valid value for nullable-types) and the result is easily coalesced out (with ??) to bool.

Happy coding.