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 can make your codes more modular using tap, and can achieve a better management of local variables. For example, in the following code, you don't need to assign a local variable to the newly created object, in the scope of the method. Note that the block variable, u, is scoped within the block. It is actually one of the beauties of ruby code.

def a_method
  ...
  name = "foobar"
  ...
  return User.new.tap do |u|
    u.username = name
    u.save!
  end
end