New to Elixir 1.3 - Kernel.pop_in

Back in February I wrote about how to work with deeply nested maps. One missing piece was the ability to easily prune data from a deeply nested map. Today I’d like to introduce you to Kernel.pop_in which will be available in Elixir 1.3.

Given the following:

my_map = %{
  foo: %{
    bar: %{
      baz: "my value"
    }
  }
}

In order to delete the baz atom you would have to write something like this:

put_in(my_map, [:foo, :bar], %{})

For this contrite example it may not seem that bad. But let’s take a look at another example:

my_map = %{
  foo: %{
    bar: %{
      baz: "my value",
      qux: "other value"
    }
  }
}

If we wanted to preserve the qux atom we’d write:

put_in(my_map, [:foo, :bar], Map.delete(my_map[:foo][:bar], :baz))

Now we’re starting to see something that could get ugly. This is where Kernel.pop_in can help:

pop_in(my_map, [:foo, :bar, :baz])

That’s nice and clean! However, unlike the other accessor-based functions this one returns a tuple:

{"my value", %{foo: %{bar: %{qux: "other value"}}}} = pop_in(my_map, [:foo, :bar, :baz])

The first element in the tuple will be the value that is being removed. The second element will be the new map.

Elixir 1.3 comes packed with a bunch of improvements for the developer experience like this one. Hopefully we can all start enjoying it soon!