Ruby's Safe Navigation Operator

I was recently working on a Ruby project and coworker had never used the safe navigation operator in Ruby so I thought I'd write about it.

Scenario

Imagine you have a blog_post which has an owner who has a name and you want to get the name of owner. You could write the following code:

name = blog_post.owner.name
  

Although, what if the blog_post or owner is nil? Ruby would raise an exception: NoMethodError (undefined method for nil:NilClass). To avoid this you could rewrite the above code like this:

if blog_post && blog_post.owner
  name = blog_post.owner.name
end
    

Although safer it can quickly get annoying to be that verbose every time we need to chain method calls.

The Safe Navigation Operator (&.)

Introduced in Ruby 2.3.0 we now have succinct way to safely chain method calls. Taking the example from above we can rewrite it like this:

name = blog_post&.owner&.name
  

Gotchas

The safe navigation operator only guards against nil objects. It doesn't give you the ability to blindly call any method on objects. For example:

nil&.foo
#=> nil

"string"&.foo
#=> NoMethodError (undefined method `foo' for "string":String)