How to check if something exists without multiple indentations?

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#1

Hey so I was curious if Roblox ever decided to properly implement a way to check if something “exists” or hasn’t been destroyed/ added to debris.

Normally you’d just do:

if object ~= nil then

But that doesn’t seem to work a lot of the time. You’ll get an error immediately after if you try to reference a property or call FindFirstChild() on it.

So you have to do:

if object ~= nil then
      if object.Parent~= nil then

I was curious if there’s a better way to do this, because my scripts spit out loads of errors any time something is deleted or missing. (Like if you jumped off the edge with a tool, the tool will chuck out errors trying to reference nil objects even though there exists 1 layer sanity checks)

#2

Well you don’t need to do if object ~= nil you just need to do if object then. And whats wrong its only a couple extra words to write

#3

You could do:

if not object then

It checks if the object is not nil.

#4

Actually that checks if the object does not exist since not is making it opposite and thus saying check if it is the opposite of existing.

@VeinTweek’s suggestion is most used. You can use if object then to check if the object exists.

#5

Does that work now? I remember that being the outright incorrect way to do it for the longest time because of it returning false positives endlessly

#6

You can do:

if object and object.Parent then

If the first statement is false then it won’t move on to the second statement.

#7

EDIT: I replied to wrong person, sorry! Your method works

I just conducted some tests and just doing a “if [variable] then” approach doesn’t work

    if target ~= nil then
		if target.Parent ~= nil then
			if target.Parent.Parent ~= nil then
			else
				target = nil
			end
		else
			target = nil
		end
	end

This is some code I run on the value of an ObjectValue. It’s checking if target (a humanoidrootpart in a player) exists. When I reset, THIS version of the code is able to verify that indeed it is gone.

    if target then
	else
		target = nil
	end

THIS, however, doesn’t work. Even after the player dies it will still have a target value that lingers. It still believes the humanoidrootpart exists.