10 less-known (but awesome!) Laravel Collections methods
Laravel Eloquent is awesome – probably I don’t need to tell you that. What is less known is the list of methods to work with Eloquent Collections. You can filter them, slice them, easily modify etc. But let’s look at it one by one.
A little notice here – that Collections are a broader term, whereas Eloquent Collections are the implementation of these broader Collections. So everything that we cover here in this article can be used for both instances.
So, for example, you have Laravel code like this:
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$books = Book::where('release_year', 2015)->get(); |
In this case $books is a collection, which is basically an array with additional features. For example it can look like this:
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[ ['title' => 'Lean Startup', 'price' => 10], ['title' => 'The One Thing', 'price' => 15], ['title' => 'Laravel: Code Bright', 'price' => 20], ['title' => 'The 4-Hour Work Week', 'price' => 5], ] |
So what can we do with it? Important note: all those functions below are called without querying the database – so you run a query once and then perform all actions with collection “offline”.
1. avg()
If you want to calculate average price of the book, you don’t need to query database separately for that.
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$average_price = $books->avg('price'); // in our case, 12.5 |
2. chunk()
If you want to split the results by equal parts, for example to view them as columns, it can look like this:
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$chunks = $books->chunk(2); $chunks->toArray(); |
And the result:
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[ [ ['title' => 'Lean Startup', 'price' => 10], ['title' => 'The One Thing', 'price' => 15] ], [ ['title' => 'Laravel: Code Bright', 'price' => 20], ['title' => 'The 4-Hour Work Week', 'price' => 5], ] ] |
3. contains()
Simple – check whether our collection contains a certain value in one of the fields:
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$books->contains('title', 'The One Thing'); // TRUE $books->contains('title', 'The Second Thing'); // FALSE |
4. every()
Another method of splitting the collection into a different columns. This time – every() would form a new collection, consisting of every N-th element.
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$books->every(2); // every 2nd element |
Result:
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[ ['title' => 'Lean Startup', 'price' => 10], ['title' => 'Laravel: Code Bright', 'price' => 20], ] |
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5. filter()
This method was already a topic of separate mini-article so will just briefly repeat:
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$expensive_books = $books->filter(function ($book) { return $book->price > 10; }); |
6. forget()
This is a method to use if you want to get rid of one of the columns.
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$books->forget('price'); |
Result:
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[ ['title' => 'Lean Startup'], ['title' => 'The One Thing'], ['title' => 'Laravel: Code Bright'], ['title' => 'The 4-Hour Work Week'], ] |
7. implode()
Really similar to a well-known PHP array implode() function. The result is a joined string:
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$books->implode('title', ', '); |
Result:
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'Lean Startup, The One Thing, Laravel: Code Bright, The 4-Hour Work Week' |
8. keyBy()
This is a really useful one to use with foreach loops later. Basically, it transforms a collection into an array with your chosen key.
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$by_key = $books->keyBy('title'); $by_key->all(); |
Result:
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[ 'Lean Startup' => ['title' => 'Lean Startup', 'price' => 10], 'The One Thing' => ['title' => 'The One Thing', 'price' => 15], 'Laravel: Code Bright' => ['title' => 'Laravel: Code Bright', 'price' => 20], 'The 4-Hour Work Week' => ['title' => 'The 4-Hour Work Week', 'price' => 5], ] |
9. map()
If you want to extract some values and perform some actions with them – there’s not only foreach().
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$discounted_books = $books->map(function ($item) { return ['title' => $item->title, 'price' => $item->price / 2]; }); |
Result:
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[ ['title' => 'Lean Startup', 'price' => 5], ['title' => 'The One Thing', 'price' => 7.5], ['title' => 'Laravel: Code Bright', 'price' => 10], ['title' => 'The 4-Hour Work Week', 'price' => 2.5], ] |
10. pluck()
This method allows you to extract just one column easily.
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$prices = $books->pluck('price'); $plucked->all(); |
Result:
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[10, 15, 20, 5] |
So this is hand-picked 10 less-known methods, but it’s not even a half of what’s available. You can find full list with short examples in the official documentation for Eloquent Collections and Basic Collections.
Keep digging deeper into Laravel world!
Would really love to see lesson how to integerate paysera api with laravel and make everything work from zero to getting payments 🙂
Hi Marius,
Thanks for the suggestion, problem is that Paysera is quite local, here at Laravel Daily I want to write to global audience. But will figure something out.
ok, thanks !
Nice!!!! So nice! 🙂
I just love Laravel more and more every day 🙂 Thanks for these tips
It’s not laravel, It’s Eloquent ORM…
Thanks Povilas, nice tips 🙂
ah i just knew about forget and implode … Thanks 🙂
My favourite method at the moment is groupBy(‘key’). Super useful for grouping a list of events by date.
You are wrong for forget method. In your it doesn’t work for multidimensional array.
Little mistake in pluck() section.
It must be:
Thanks for this. Just wanted to add that you can use pluck() to extract two columns which is super useful for creating select boxes.
$book_list = $books->pluck(‘title’, ‘id’);
$book_list is now a collection that looks like:
[
1 => ”Lean Startup’],
2 => [‘The One Thing’],
3 => [‘Laravel: Code Bright’],
4 => [‘The 4-Hour Work Week’],
]
Which you can then use in a blade template via the Illuminate\Html\FormBuilder select() method like:
Form::select(‘book_id’, $book_list, old(‘book_id’, $default_book_id), [‘class’ => ‘form-control’]);
Hello.How do I check If my entered number falls in which row.
for eg:I entered 9
and I have a table where a column named price is as below
id price
1 5
2 10
3 15
If I entered 9,I want to get id 1 ,as my entered price is below 10,but above 5.Can you please help me
Here is one you may have left out. Dot notation when searching for nested properties
collect([[‘name’ => [‘first’ => ‘Peter’]], [‘name’ => [‘first’ => ‘Joe’]]])->where(‘name.first’, ‘Joe’)