How do I script Yoshi's tongue mechanic in a 2d sidescroller?

I’m trying to figure out how to replicate the mechanic in which Yoshi sticks out his tongue to grab enemies into his mouth and can spit them out as well for a blueprint. If this sounds like a noob questions, please forgive me since I just started using UE4. Thanks.

I don’t have my PC nearby atm but id imagine you’d probably want a mesh for the tongue that scales when the ability is called. Then when that mesh hits/ overlaps an object you’d check to make sure that it can be “stuck” to the tongue. If it can be, you can just attach it to a socket on the mesh. Then when it hits yoshi’s mouth you’d cache whatever values you’d need then destroy or hide the item. When you spit it back out you can regenerate the object from the cached values.