Piping :ok tuples

The pipe operator |> is probably my favorite part of the elixir language; programming, more often than not, it can get messy and confusing for people new to the language.

This is especially true when having to pipe functions that return an {:ok, payload} tuple; dealing with it can be tricky, but there are a few easy ways to do so:

• Use with rather than piping
• Use an exclamation mark version of the function if available
• Create a helper function that extracts the value and also deals with error
• Use an anonymous function in the pipe
• Pipe into elem/2

I found the last one most helpful, especially when dealing with the elixir DateTime library.

    last_check =
      last_check
      |> DateTimeParser.parse_datetime()
      |> elem(1)
      |> DateTime.from_naive!("Etc/UTC")

References

• Pipe second tuple member