Avoiding Scala's Option.fold

Scala's Option.fold is a bit nasty to use sometimes because type inference is not always great. Here is a stupid toy example:

val someValue: Option[String] = ??? val processed = someValue.fold[Either[Error, UserName]]( Left(Error("No user name given")) )( value => Right(UserName(value)) )

The [Either[Error, UserName]] on fold is necessary otherwise the scala compiler can not derive the type.

Here is a really small trick to avoid Option.fold when you need to convert an Option to an Either:

val someValue: Option[String] = ??? val processed = someValue .toRight(left = Error("No user name given")) .map(value => Right(UserName(value)))

Much nicer!