Seeing the ampersand for the first time in Elixir I wanted to dig deep into what it meant. The ampersand is called the capture operator in Elixir. The first & effectively either gets a reference to the original function or starts an anonymous function. Any ampersand after the first that references the positional argument passed to it. You could use this to write very concise anonymous functions.
Here’s a couple of examples:
messages = ["One", "Two"]
no_capture_operator = fn msg ->
IO.inspect(msg, label: 'no_capture_operator')
%{itemValue: msg}
end
# no_capture_operator: "One"
# no_capture_operator: "Two"
messages |> Enum.map(no_capture_operator)
new_messages = messages |> Enum.map(&%{itemValue: &1})
IO.inspect(new_messages)
# [%{itemValue: "One"}, %{itemValue: "Two"}]
new_messages = messages |> Enum.map(fn msg ->
IO.inspect(msg)
%{itemValue: msg}
end)
# "One"
# "Two"
IO.inspect(new_messages, label: "new_messages =")
# new_messages =: [%{itemValue: "One"}, %{itemValue: "Two"}]
message_func = fn msg ->
IO.inspect(msg)
%{itemValue: msg}
end
messages |> Enum.map(&message_func.(&1))
# "One"
# "Two"
# the enum tuples have zero-based indexes, hence the + 1
message_with_odd_even = &%{itemValue: &1, type: (if rem(&2 + 1, 2) === 0, do: "even", else: "odd")}
msg_tuple = {"One", 0}
IO.inspect(message_with_odd_even.(elem(msg_tuple, 0), elem(msg_tuple, 1)))
# %{itemValue: "One", type: "odd"}
IO.inspect(message_with_odd_even.("One", 0))
# %{itemValue: "One", type: "odd"}
new_messages = messages |> Enum.with_index |> Enum.map(&message_with_odd_even.(elem(&1, 0), elem(&1, 1)))
IO.inspect(new_messages, label: 'new_messages 2 =')
# new_messages 2 =: [%{itemValue: "One", type: "odd"}, %{itemValue: "Two", type: "even"}]
messages |> Enum.each(&IO.inspect(&1, label: "label for " <> &1))
# label for One: "One"
# label for Two: "Two"
Read more at the official docs: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/modules-and-functions.html#function-capturing