In Ruby, is there an Array method that combines 'select' and 'map'?

Ruby 2.7+

There is now!

Ruby 2.7 is introducing filter_map for this exact purpose. It's idiomatic and performant, and I'd expect it to become the norm very soon.

For example:

numbers = [1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 13]
enum.filter_map { |i| i * 2 if i.even? }
# => [4, 16, 20]

Here's a good read on the subject.

Hope that's useful to someone!

You can use reduce for this, which requires only one pass:

[1,1,1,2,3,4].reduce([]) { |a, n| a.push(n*3) if n==1; a }
=> [3, 3, 3] 

In other words, initialize the state to be what you want (in our case, an empty list to fill: []), then always make sure to return this value with modifications for each element in the original list (in our case, the modified element pushed to the list).

This is the most efficient since it only loops over the list with one pass (map + select or compact requires two passes).

In your case:

def example
  results = @lines.reduce([]) do |lines, line|
    lines.push( ...(line) ) if ...
    lines
  end
  return results.uniq.sort
end

I usually use map and compact together along with my selection criteria as a postfix if. compact gets rid of the nils.

jruby-1.5.0 > [1,1,1,2,3,4].map{|n| n*3 if n==1}    
 => [3, 3, 3, nil, nil, nil] 


jruby-1.5.0 > [1,1,1,2,3,4].map{|n| n*3 if n==1}.compact
 => [3, 3, 3]