Consider a parameterless (edit: not necessarily) function that performs a single line of code, and is called only once in the program (though it is not impossible that it'll be needed again in the future).

It could perform a query, check some values, do something involving regex... anything obscure or "hacky".

The rationale behind this would be to avoid hardly-readable evaluations:

if (getCondition()) {
    // do stuff
}


where getCondition() is the one-line function.

My question is simply: is this a good practice? It seems alright to me but I don't know about the long term...

Depends on that one line. If the line is readable and concise by itself, the function may not be needed. Simplistic example:



void printNewLine() {
  System.out.println();
}


OTOH, if the function gives a good name to a line of code containing e.g. a complex, hard to read expression, it is perfectly justified (to me). Contrived example (broken into multiple lines for readability here):

boolean isTaxPayerEligibleForTaxRefund() {
  return taxPayer.isFemale() 
        && (taxPayer.getNumberOfChildren() > 2 
        || (taxPayer.getAge() > 50 && taxPayer.getEmployer().isNonProfit()));
}

