How to check if an object is nullable?

c# .net nullable
Autodidact picture Autodidact · Dec 17, 2008 · Viewed 97.1k times · Source

How do I check if a given object is nullable in other words how to implement the following method...

bool IsNullableValueType(object o)
{
    ...
}

EDIT: I am looking for nullable value types. I didn't have ref types in mind. 

//Note: This is just a sample. The code has been simplified 
//to fit in a post.

public class BoolContainer
{
    bool? myBool = true;
}

var bc = new BoolContainer();

const BindingFlags bindingFlags = BindingFlags.Public
                        | BindingFlags.NonPublic
                        | BindingFlags.Instance
                        ;


object obj;
object o = (object)bc;

foreach (var fieldInfo in o.GetType().GetFields(bindingFlags))
{
    obj = (object)fieldInfo.GetValue(o);
}

obj now refers to an object of type bool (System.Boolean) with value equal to true. What I really wanted was an object of type Nullable<bool>

So now as a work around I decided to check if o is nullable and create a nullable wrapper around obj.

Answer

Marc Gravell picture Marc Gravell · Dec 17, 2008

There are two types of nullable - Nullable<T> and reference-type.

Jon has corrected me that it is hard to get type if boxed, but you can with generics: - so how about below. This is actually testing type T, but using the obj parameter purely for generic type inference (to make it easy to call) - it would work almost identically without the obj param, though.

static bool IsNullable<T>(T obj)
{
    if (obj == null) return true; // obvious
    Type type = typeof(T);
    if (!type.IsValueType) return true; // ref-type
    if (Nullable.GetUnderlyingType(type) != null) return true; // Nullable<T>
    return false; // value-type
}

But this won't work so well if you have already boxed the value to an object variable.

Microsoft documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/nullable-types/how-to-identify-a-nullable-type

Related questions

How to set null value to int in c#?

int value=0; if (value == 0) { value = null; } How can I set value to null above? Any help will be appreciated.

Read More
How to parse a string into a nullable int

I'm wanting to parse a string into a nullable int in C#. ie. I want to get back either the int value of the string or null if it can't be parsed. I was kind of hoping that this would …

Read More
Which is preferred: Nullable<T>.HasValue or Nullable<T> != null?

I always used Nullable<>.HasValue because I liked the semantics. However, recently I was working on someone else's existing codebase where they used Nullable<> != null exclusively instead. Is there a reason to use one over the …

Read More