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

You're right: the use of tap in your example is kind of pointless and probably less clean than your alternatives.

As Rebitzele notes, tap is just a convenience method, often used to create a shorter reference to the current object.

One good use case for tap is for debugging: you can modify the object, print the current state, then continue modifying the object in the same block. See here for example: http://moonbase.rydia.net/mental/blog/programming/eavesdropping-on-expressions.

I occasionally like to use tap inside methods to conditionally return early while returning the current object otherwise.