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

Using tap, as the blogger did, is simply a convenience method. It may have been overkill in your example, but in cases where you'd want to do a bunch of things with the user, tap can arguably provide a cleaner looking interface. So, perhaps it may be better in an example as follows:

user = User.new.tap do |u|
  u.build_profile
  u.process_credit_card
  u.ship_out_item
  u.send_email_confirmation
  u.blahblahyougetmypoint
end

Using the above makes it easy to quickly see that all those methods are grouped together in that they all refer to the same object (the user in this example). The alternative would be:

user = User.new
user.build_profile
user.process_credit_card
user.ship_out_item
user.send_email_confirmation
user.blahblahyougetmypoint

Again, this is debatable - but the case can be made that the second version looks a little messier, and takes a little more human parsing to see that all the methods are being called on the same object.