Ruby 1.9’s Object#tap method has always seemed useful to me, but until now I hadn’t met the chance to use it. Every other time it seemed like abusing it in some way.

Now I came to an old code. Consider this:

cgi.text_field( "name" => "myfield",
                "value" => value,
                "size" => 20,
                "maxlength" => maxlength
              )

I needed to turn that maxlength into a conditional attribute (omiting it if it’s nil).
One way would have been extracting the attributes into a separate variable:

attrs = {
          "name" => "myfield",
          "value" => value,
          "size" => 20
        }
attrs['maxlength'] = maxlength if maxlength
cgi.text_field( attrs )

But this separates visually the cgi.text_field() call from it’s arguments, which I don’t like. Tap to the resque:

cgi.text_field({  "name" => "myfield",
                  "value" => value,
                  "size" => 20
                }.tap{|attrs| 
                  attrs['maxlength'] = maxlength if maxlength
                })

Now, isn’t that nice! (OK, maybe it isn’t, but at least it is encompassed in the method call and makes it easy to spot all attributes).