7 Laravel Collection Methods You Might Not Know

7 Laravel Collection Methods You Might Not Know

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4 min read

In Laravel, instances of Collections are used absolutely everywhere. There are lots of methods you can use on them. In the beginning, I just used the most well-known methods like map, filter, reduce and first. But there are many more, and some of them are useful shortcuts to reduce boilerplate.

Here are my top 7 methods I use all the time, but did not know when I started with Laravel.

1 keyBy

The keyBy method adds keys to a Collection. You can specify the key by its name or with a callback:

$c = collect([
    ['id' => 'ID-1', 'name' => 'Alice', 'age' => 34],
    ['id' => 'ID-2', 'name' => 'Kevin', 'age' => 39],
]);

$c->keyBy('id');
/*
    collect([
        'ID-1' => ['id' => 'ID-1', 'name' => 'Alice', 'age' => 34],
        'ID-2' => ['id' => 'ID-2', 'name' => 'Kevin', 'age' => 39],
    ])
*/

It's a neat shortcut for mapWithKeys where the value is unchanged.

2 reject

reject is the inverse of the well-known filter method. It can be called with a value or a callback:

$c = collect(['Alice', 'Bob', null, 'Ben', 'Carla']);

$c = $c->reject(null);
// collect(['Alice', 'Bob', 'Ben', 'Carla']);

$c->reject(fn(string $name): bool => str_starts_with($name, 'B'));
// collect(['Alice', 'Carla']);

I use reject to replace instances of filter where the condition is negated because it makes the code more readable.

3 pluck

The pluck method allows you to retrieve nested values of a Collection. If you pass a second argument to pluck, it will use it to add keys:

$employees = collect([
    ['name' => 'Alice', 'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 45],
    ['name' => 'Bob',   'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 39],
    ['name' => 'Carl',  'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 51],
    ['name' => 'Darcy', 'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 28],
]);

$employees->pluck('name');
// collect(['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl', 'Darcy'])

$employees->pluck('age', 'name');
// collect(['Alice' => 45, 'Bob' => 39, 'Carl' => 51, 'Darcy' => 28])

It's a shortcut for map or mapWithKeys where you just want to get some values.

4 contains

The contains method reports whether the given value is present in the Collection. But what I did not know was, that you can also pass a key, to check for a nested value:

$employees = collect([
    ['name' => 'Alice', 'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 45],
    ['name' => 'Bob',   'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 39],
    ['name' => 'Carl',  'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 51],
    ['name' => 'Darcy', 'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 28],
]);

$employees->contains('name', 'Jack');
// false

$employees->contains('name', 'Bob');
// true

This can replace combinations like ->pluck('name')->contains('Jack'), where you first retrieve values to then call contains on them.

5 firstWhere

firstWhere is a classic shortcut which returns the first value which matches a certain condition. The condition can be a value, callback or key with operator and operand:

$employees = collect([
    ['name' => 'Alice', 'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 45],
    ['name' => 'Bob',   'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 39],
    ['name' => 'Carl',  'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 51],
    ['name' => 'Darcy', 'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 28],
]);

$employees->firstWhere('age', '>' 50);
// ['name' => 'Carl', 'position' => 'Manager', 'age' => 51]

This is a shortcut for a combination of chained calls to where and first.

6 flatMap

The flatMap method combines the map and the flatten methods. The callback given to flatMap can modify each element. Then, all the values are flattened into a new collection.

$employees = collect([
    ['name' => 'Alice', 'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 45],
    ['name' => 'Bob',   'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 39],
    ['name' => 'Carl',  'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 51],
    ['name' => 'Darcy', 'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 28],
]);

$employees->flatMap(
    fn($e) => strtoupper($e['name'])
);
// collect(['ALICE', 'BOB', 'CARL', 'DARCY'])

This is a shortcut for a combination of chained calls to flatten and map.

7 partition

partition allows to separate the values in a Collection into two Collections, based on a callback:

$employees = collect([
    ['name' => 'Alice', 'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 45],
    ['name' => 'Bob',   'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 39],
    ['name' => 'Carl',  'position' => 'Manager',    'age' => 51],
    ['name' => 'Darcy', 'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 28],
]);

[$m, $p] = $employees->partition(
    fn($e) => $e['position'] === 'Manager'
);

$m;
/*
    collect([
        ['name' => 'Alice', 'position' => 'Manager', 'age' => 45],
        ['name' => 'Carl',  'position' => 'Manager', 'age' => 51],
    ])
*/

$p;
/*
    collect([
        ['name' => 'Bob',   'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 39],
        ['name' => 'Darcy', 'position' => 'Programmer', 'age' => 28],
    ])
*/

This can replace more complex for loops or multiple filter calls.


๐Ÿ‘‰ See the Laravel Documentation for the complete reference.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Which Collection methods are you using?

๐Ÿ‘‰ Do you think Laravel has too many Collection methods and shortcuts?

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