How to Use Laravel Collections Effectively

Laravel Collection is one of the most powerful features that beginner developers often underestimate. A Collection is an elegant wrapper for working with array data, providing dozens of built-in methods that make data manipulation easy without writing manual loops. After reading this article, you'll use Collection more intelligently and efficiently.

What Is a Laravel Collection?

A Collection is an instance of the Illuminate\Support\Collection class. Every Eloquent query that returns multiple rows automatically becomes a Collection. You can also create a Collection manually:

<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Collection;

// From a plain array
$collection = collect([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]);

// From an associative array
$users = collect([
    ['name' => 'Budi', 'age' => 25, 'city' => 'Jakarta'],
    ['name' => 'Ani',  'age' => 30, 'city' => 'Bandung'],
    ['name' => 'Caca', 'age' => 22, 'city' => 'Jakarta'],
    ['name' => 'Dodi', 'age' => 28, 'city' => 'Surabaya'],
]);

The map() Method — Transforming Data

map() iterates over each item and returns a new Collection of the transformed results:

// Convert all names to uppercase
$upperNames = $users->map(function ($user) {
    return strtoupper($user['name']);
});
// Result: ['BUDI', 'ANI', 'CACA', 'DODI']

// With an arrow function (PHP 7.4+)
$prices = collect([10000, 25000, 15000]);
$discounted = $prices->map(fn($price) => $price * 0.9);
// Result: [9000, 22500, 13500]

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How to Use Laravel Collections Effectively

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