Laravel Collection Helper Cheat Sheet

Laravel's Collection class offers a fluent, convenient wrapper around arrays, enabling powerful data manipulation through a rich set of methods. The following cheat sheet lists common operations with example code.

collect([1, 2, 3]); // create a collection

Retrieve the underlying array:

$collection->all();

Calculate the average of items:

collect([1, 1, 2, 4])->avg(); // returns 2

Chunk the collection into smaller groups:

collect([1, 2, 3, 4, 5])->chunk(2); // [[1,2], [3,4], [5]]

Collapse nested arrays into a single collection:

collect([[1], [4, 5]])->collapse(); // [1, 4, 5]

Combine two arrays into a key/value collection:

collect(['name', 'age'])->combine(['George', 29]);

Append items to the end of a collection:

collect(['PHP'])->concat(['Laravel']); // ['PHP', 'Laravel']

Check if a collection contains a given value:

collect(['name' => 'Desk'])->contains('Desk'); // true

Filter a collection using a callback:

$filtered = $collection->filter(function ($item) { return $item > 2; });

Map each item to a new value:

$multiplied = $collection->map(function ($item) { return $item * 2; });

Sort the collection by a given key:

$sorted = $collection->sortBy('price');

Convert the collection to JSON or a plain array:

$json = $collection->toJson();
$array = $collection->toArray();

Additional useful methods include pluck , first , last , push , pop , shift , unshift , unique , values , zip , and many others, each enabling concise and readable data handling within Laravel applications.