Question

My question is not about how to solve this error(I already solved it) but why is this error with boolean value.

My function is

private string NumberToString(int number, bool flag)
{
    string str;

    switch(flag)
    {
        case true: 
            str = number.ToString("00");
            break;
        case false:
            str = number.ToString("0000"); 
            break;
    }

    return str;
}

Error is Use of unassigned local variable 'str'. Bool can only take true or false. So it will populate str in either case. Then why this error?

Moreover this error is gone if along with true and false case I add a default case, but still what can a bool hold apart from true and false?

Why this strange behaviour with bool variable?

Answer 1

The error you get is about string variable and not boolean possible values.

The fact that there is no way that noone of cases run, is a true (in this case), but compiler doesn’t go so far in analyzing the code. It just looks on variable that is not assigned and used in some conditions and there is not default one, so suppose that there could be some case when it remains unassigned.