Using collection macros in Laravel

Laravel 5.2 provides some nice additions to the framework. One handy feature that I don’t see listed in the release notes is that Collection now is macroable. Using it’s macro function you can easily extend Illuminate\Support\Collection with your own custom functions.

Take a look at this piece of code to uppercase every string in a collection.

$uppercaseWords = collect(['code', 'ferengi'])->map(function($word)  {
   return strtoupper($word);
});

That’s good code, but image you need to uppercase a lot of collections. Typing the same closure will get very tiresome. Let’s improve this with a macro.

use Illuminate\Support\Collection;

Collection::macro('uppercase', function() {

    return collect($this->items)->map(function($word) {
        return strtoupper($word);
    });

});

You could create a service provider to load up these macro’s. Now that the macro is defined let’s uppercase collections like there’s no tomorrow:

$uppercaseWords = collect(['code', 'ferengi'])->uppercase();
$moreUppercaseWords = collect(['love', 'the', 'facade'])->uppercase();
$evenMoreUppercaseWords = collect(['activerecord', 'forever'])->uppercase();