Write Cleaner Code With Laravel Tap Helper Function

Laravel tap helper function provides you with a way of writing more cleaner and one-liner code.

Let's see with an example. Let’s say you need to write a function to save data into laravel Cache and access it later.
One way of doing this is like this

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;


class UserController extends Controller
{

    public function saveUserName($name){
        Cache::set('name',$name);
    }

    public function getUserName(){
        
        $userName = Cache::get('name');
                Cache:forget('name');
        return $userName;
    }

}

Here in the first function, we are setting the user name; in the second function, we are getting that user name from the cache.
Let's write using it with the Tap helper function

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;


class UserController extends Controller
{

    public function saveUserName($name){
        Cache::set('name',$name);
    }

    public function getUserName(){

        return tap(Cache::get('name'), fn()=> Cache::forget('name'));
    }

}

Let's talk about the tap helper function, It has two parts one is the callback and the second part is the function it executes on that callback.