Laravel: Up & Running, 3rd Edition

Chapter 17. Helpers and Collections

We’ve already covered many global functions throughout the book: these are little helpers that make it easier to perform common tasks, like dispatch() for jobs, event() for events, and app() for dependency resolution. We also talked a bit about Laravel’s collections, or arrays on steroids, in Chapter 5.

In this chapter we’ll cover some of the more common and powerful helpers and some of the basics of programming with collections. Many of the “helpers” in this section that once were global functions are now calls on facades; array_first(), the global function, has been replaced by Arr::first(), the auth call. So while these aren’t all technically helpers, as they’re not all global functions anymore, they still have the same position in our toolbox.

Helpers

You can find a full list of the helpers Laravel offers in the helpers docs, but we’re going to cover a few of the most useful functions here.

Arrays

PHP’s native array manipulation functions give us a lot of power, but sometimes there are standard manipulations we want to make that require unwieldy loops and logic checks. Laravel’s array helpers make a few common array manipulations much simpler:

Arr::first($array, $callback, $default = null)

Returns the first array value that passes a test, defined in a callback closure. You can optionally set the default value as the third parameter. Here’s an example:

$people = [
    [
        'email' => '[e-mail]',
        'name' => 'Malcolm Me'
    ],
    [
        'email' => '[e-mail]' ...