advantage of tap method in ruby

Question

I was just reading a blog article and noticed that the author used tap in a snippet something like:

user = User.new.tap do |u|
  u.username = \         


        

Answer 1

Another case to use tap is to make manipulation on object before returning it.

So instead of this:

def some_method
  ...
  some_object.serialize
  some_object
end

we can save extra line:

def some_method
  ...
  some_object.tap{ |o| o.serialize }
end

In some situation this technique can save more then one line and make code more compact.