What is the Equatable Protocol in Swift?

Compare your Swift objects for equality with ease

In this tutorial, we will learn about the Equatable protocol in Swift by quickly experimenting with it in an Xcode Playground.

Equatable allows us to provide a functionality for comparing our custom Swift structures and classes.

Let’s Start

Suppose we have an app that lists different products that users can buy. So we define the Product and ProductCategory structures:

And instantiate them:

Now, if we want to check whether these two products are equal, we write the following long if statement:

How could we optimize the comparison process?

Conforming to the Equatable Protocol

Let’s conform to the Equatable protocol by implementing the required == method:

Now, we can easily compare two Products without writing that long if statement:

Wrapping Up

Interested in other comparison techniques? Feel free to check out my piece on the Comparable protocol:

To learn more about the Equatable protocol, visit the official Apple documentation:

Thanks for reading!