What's the best way to unwrap an Optional?

[bbuck]

We ran into an issue with our linter today. We had a Data definition like:

class Example extends Data
{
    public function __construct(
        public Optional|string|null $startTime,
    ) {}
}

And we wanted to add a computed value using a service function so we added:

    $this->computedProperty = app(ExampleService::class)->generateComputedProperty($startTime);

The problem is that generateComputedProperty takes a ?string and is used throughout the application, not just with Spatie so we didn't want to have to handle Optional here -- and it looks like Optional is an empty placeholder anyways.

The only we could find to "unwrap" it was:

if ($startTime === null || $startTime instanceof Optional) {
  $startTimeInput = null;
} else {
  $startTimeInput = "";
}

Does the library provide a way to cleanly unwrap optional values? I threw this together quickly and it worked:

/**
 * @template TData
 * @param TData|Optional
 * @return ?TData
 */
public function unwrap(mixed $input): mixed
{
    if ($input instanceof Optional) {
        return null;
    }

    return $input;
}

That could be part of the Optional API to make it accessible (and no pollute globals) so you could Optional::unwrap($startTime) and get the ?string out of it.

edit: if the unwrap solution is sensible I'm happy to make a PR for it.