Does Typescript support the ?. operator? (And, what’s it called?)

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Yes. As of TypeScript 3.7 (released on November 5, 2019), this feature is supported and is called Optional Chaining:

At its core, optional chaining lets us write code where TypeScript can immediately stop running some expressions if we run into a null or undefined. The star of the show in optional chaining is the new ?. operator for optional property accesses.

Refer to the TypeScript 3.7 release notes for more details.

Prior to version 3.7, this was not supported in TypeScript, although it was requested as early as Issue #16 on the TypeScript repo (dating back to 2014).

As far as what to call this operator, there doesn’t appear to be a consensus. In addition to “optional chaining” (which is also what it’s called in JavaScript and Swift), there are a couple of other examples:

  • CoffeeScript refers to it as the existential operator (specifically, the “accessor variant” of the existential operator):

The accessor variant of the existential operator ?. can be used to soak up null references in a chain of properties. Use it instead of the dot accessor . in cases where the base value may be null or undefined.

a null-conditional operator applies a member access, ?., or element access, ?[], operation to its operand only if that operand evaluates to non-null; otherwise, it returns null.

There are probably lots of other examples, too.

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