Laravel MessageBag Public API: merge

By John Koster November 29, 2016

merge($messages)

The merge method is used to combine, or merge, the contents of the MessageBag instance with the provided $messages. The $messages can be any valid array or an object instance that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Support\MessageProvider interface. The merge method modifies the original MessageBag instance and returns a reference to the instance.

For example, the array:

 1<?php
 2
 3$arrayToMerge = [
 4    'username' => [
 5        'The username is required',
 6    ],
 7    'password' => [
 8        'The passwords do not match',
 9    ]
10];

can be merged with the following message bag:

1<?php
2
3use Illuminate\Support\MessageBag;
4
5// Create a new MessageBag instance.
6$messages = new MessageBag;
7$messages->add('username', 'That username has already been taken');

like so:

1<?php
2
3// Merge the $arrayToMerge with the $messages
4$messages->merge($arrayToMerge);
5
6// Get the messages as an array.
7$messageArray = $messages->all();

After the above code has executed, the $messageArray variable will be an array and contain a value similar to the following output:

1array (size=3)
2  0 => string 'That username has already been taken' (length=36)
3  1 => string 'The username is required'             (length=24)
4  2 => string 'The passwords do not match'           (length=26)

Because the MessageBag class implements the MessageProvider interface, a MessageBag instance can be supplied as the argument for the $messages parameter:

 1<?php
 2
 3use Illuminate\Support\MessageBag;
 4
 5// Create the first MessageBag instance.
 6$firstMessageBag = new MessageBag([
 7    'username' => 'The username is required'
 8]);
 9
10// Create the second MessageBag instance.
11$secondMessageBag = new MessageBag([
12    'username' => 'That username has already been taken'
13]);
14
15// Merge the two MessageBags.
16$firstMessageBag->merge($secondMessageBag);
17
18// Get the messages as an array.
19$messageArray = $firstMessageBag->all();

After the above code has executed the $messageArray variable will be an array and contain a value similar to the following output:

1array (size=2)
2  0 => string 'The username is required'             (length=24)
3  1 => string 'That username has already been taken' (length=36)

#Continue Reading

This article is the start of a mini-series about Laravel's ErrorMessageBag component. Click through the rest of the articles to continue reading:

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