Safe Navigation Operator

Safely Handling Nil Objects in Ruby

The safe navigation operator (&.) provides a concise way to handle potentially nil objects. It returns nil instead of raising a NoMethodError when encountering nil.

# Without safe navigation
if user && user.profile && user.profile.address
  puts user.profile.address
end

# With safe navigation
puts user&.profile&.address

Perfect for dealing with optional associations, API responses, and database records that might not exist. Use it to write more elegant and defensive code.

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