Is there a way to initialize an object from a primitive type? Something like

data class Foo(val a: String) {
    
    init {
        //magic that takes string and sets it to a
    }
}

var Bar : Foo = "b"

No. Generally speaking, Kotlin avoids this kind of implicit behavior

Yeah it makes sense - I’ve seen something analogous in Swift so I was wondering if I was missing out on a language feature thanks for the tip and recommendation 😃

You also might consider just using a typealias, though that wouldn’t have the same type safety as

ExpressibleByStringLiteral

interesting. I’m not seeing how typealias helps here, would you have a quick example?

I just mean in the case where you literally only want a better name for your String usage - if your string-containing data class has other functionality, then you’re right that a typealias won’t help

aah got it thanks 😁