Using Swift’s CustomStringConvertible

A practical protocol

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If you’re familiar with protocol in Swift, you might be aware that either struct value types or class reference types can conform to them, and this can mean that there are some requirements you might need to meet or additional functionality is added to your conforming type.

One example might be if you have a User struct:

struct User {
    let name: String
    let age: Int
}

which can be instantiated with the following type of expression:

let friend: User = User(name: "Karen", age: 32)

which can of course be printed to the console:

print (friend)

which prints this to the console: User(name: "Karen", age: 32).

Of course this is fine, but not exactly user-friendly (and you may well want such a thing to be visible to the end user at some point).

This is the default description of the type, but we can do better by supplying our own description, and doing better is something that we should always be aiming for in coding.

Conforming to CustomStringConvertable