Book Image

Kotlin Standard Library Cookbook

By : Samuel Urbanowicz
Book Image

Kotlin Standard Library Cookbook

By: Samuel Urbanowicz

Overview of this book

For developers who prefer a more simplistic approach to coding, Kotlin has emerged as a valuable solution for effective software development. The Kotlin standard library provides vital tools that make day-to-day Kotlin programming easier. This library features core attributes of the language, such as algorithmic problems, design patterns, data processing, and working with files and data streams. With a recipe-based approach, this book features coding solutions that you can readily execute. Through the book, you’ll encounter a variety of interesting topics related to data processing, I/O operations, and collections transformation. You’ll get started by exploring the most effective design patterns in Kotlin and understand how coroutines add new features to JavaScript. As you progress, you'll learn how to implement clean, reusable functions and scalable interfaces containing default implementations. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll discover recipes on functional programming concepts, such as lambdas, monads, functors, and Kotlin scoping functions, which will help you tackle a range of real-life coding problems. By the end of this book, you'll be equipped with the expertise you need to address a range of challenges that Kotlin developers face by implementing easy-to-follow solutions.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Automatic null removal

While working with poorly designed APIs of servers or external libraries, we often need to deal with receiving null return values. Thankfully, there are a number of standard library features that allow us to handle null values effectively. In this recipe, we are going to implement a data preprocessing operation which will remove all the nulls from the dataset automatically. Let's say we are working with an external API that provides us with the latest news feed. Unfortunately, it's not null-safe and can return random null values. For example, let's assume we have a getNews(): List<News> function that returns the following data:

fun getNews() = listOf(
News("Kotlin 1.2.40 is out!", "https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/"),
News("Google launches Android KTX Kotlin extensions for developers",
"https://android...