If you're in a loop you may implode

Hey - Aaron here! Joel's doing a great job - but everyone needs a break here and there. Plus, daily tips can't be that hard, right? ... famous last words...

In Blade files, we have a number of useful directives. Laravel decorates some of them with additional properties to make our life even easier.

Some of the most useful are the looping directives, like @for and @foreach. These allow us to loop through an iterable (array, Collection, etc) in a safe, easy way without leaving the safeguards of Blade. These are also decorated with the $loop variable while inside of each. This is a special property provided by Laravel to provide details and hints about the current loop.

You've probably seen this in action - especially when looping through lists of data when you're working with Eloquent collections. Especially when it comes to styling, they may include a reference to the $loop->last boolean to indicate this is the last iteration, so do something slightly different. This is fine (although a lot of this can be replaced with targeted CSS selectors), but it's not the best solution every time. Let's see an example.

@foreach($books as $book)
    <h1>{​{ $book->title }}</h1>
    <div>
        Author(s):
        @foreach($book->authors as $author)
            {​{ $author->name }}
            @unless($loop->last)
                ,
            @endunless
        @endforeach
    </div>
@endforeach

The outermost @foreach is great. But, the one for authors doesn't seem great. I get it, it's trying to do a comma-separated list of authors, but it's hard to follow. What's with that random comma just hanging out?

Sometimes we don't always have to use a loop. Let's combine a few methods of the Eloquent Collection to make this code a little simpler.

<div>
    Author(s): {​{ $book->authors->pluck('name')->implode(', ') }}
</div>

Take just the name from the collection and implode it with a comma and space. I find that sometimes I forget that I'm dealing with a Collection in the Blade file - and that these methods are available for me. Pretty sweet.

Here to help,

Aaron

P.S. I tend to be a little bit more long-winded than Joel - but that's ok. 5 more days - unless you hit reply and tell him you want it to stop now!