How do I put different types in a dictionary in the Swift Language?

Question

Swift only allows a dictionary to contain a single type.

Here's the definition that is taken from the Swift book:

A dictionary is a container that stores multiple values of the same type

[...]

They differ from Objective-C’s NSDictionary and NSMutableDictionary classes, which can use any kind of object as their keys and values and do not provide any information about the nature of these objects.

If that’s the case then how are we going to create nested dictionaries?

Imagine we have a plist that holds String, Array and Dictionary items in it . If I’m allowed to hold only the same of type of items (either string, array etc.) then how am I going to use different types of items stored in the plist?

How do I put different types in the same dictionary in Swift?

Answer 1

You can achieve plist-like nested structures using Any type for dictionary values which is Swift's somewhat counterpart to Objective-C's id type but can also hold value types.

var response = Dictionary<String, Any>() response["user"] = ["Login": "Power Ranger", "Password": "Mighty Morfin'"] response["status"] = 200 

EDIT:

Any seems to be better than AnyObject because in the above code response["status"] is of type Swift.Int, while using value type of AnyObject it is __NSCFNumber.