codebright

Eloquent Collections
I love collections. I have far too many of them. As a kid I used to collect eggcups and transformer
toys. As an adult I collect video games and manga comics. Nerdy collections are the best.
Laravel has its own collections too. It has a collection of wonderful fans, eager to help eachother
and develop the community. It has a collection of amazing developers contributing to it. It has a
collection of stories about where the name came from, most of them false. It also has Eloquent
Collections.
The Collection Class
Eloquent collections are an extension of Laravel’s Collection class with some handy methods for
dealing with query results. The Collection class itself, is merely a wrapper for an array of objects,
but has a bunch of other interesting methods to help you pluck items out of the array.
In Laravel three, an array of model instances was returned from any query method that is used to
provide multiple results. However, in Laravel four you will instead receive a Collection of model
instances. Don’t worry, you can still iterate through a collection of results with the variety of loops
that PHP offers because it inherits some properties of an array, but because the collection is a class,
and not native type, there are also methods available on the object.
Let’s take a look at the available methods of the Collection class. For our sample data we will use
the albums table from the previous chapter, and assume that the collection is the result of a call to
Album::all(), like this.
1