Ruby provides us with &. which
is called the Safe Navigation Operator.
Let's look at it in action:
The &. checks if user1 exists and
if the name method exists on user1.
We can see that it is a much simpler
approach compared to checking the existence
of each method at every subsequent stage.
Let's see how it works when we have
a nil value:
We can see that
the value of user1
becomes nil. But the
safe navigation operator ensures that
we don't get an error. It knows
that user1 is now nil and hence it simply
does not try to call the method
name on user1 keeping our code safe
from errors like these.