Laravel 5: Ensuring a Value is an Array With wrap

At some point in your PHP adventures, you have either seen, or written code like the following:

1function checkDomains($domains) {
2    if (!is_array($domains)) {
3        $domains = (array)$domains;
4    }
5 
6    foreach ($domains as $domain) {
7        // Perform some operation on the domains array.
8    }
9}

The wrap method allows you to accomplish the same task with much cleaner, and clearer syntax.

#Signature

The signature of the wrap method is:

1public static function wrap(
2    $value
3);

#Example Use

In the introduction of this section, we saw this example code:

1function checkDomains($domains) {
2    if (!is_array($domains)) {
3        $domains = (array)$domains;
4    }
5 
6    foreach ($domains as $domain) {
7        // Perform some operation on the domains array.
8    }
9}

We could do the same thing using the wrap method like so:

1use Illuminate\Support\Arr;
2 
3function checkDomains($domains) {
4    $domains = Arr::wrap($domains);
5 
6    foreach ($domains as $domain) {
7        // Perform some operation on the domains array.
8    }
9}

We can round this section out by implementing a version of checkDomains that will return an array of the domains or URLs and their response times. This example implementation relies on the Guzzle library; if you'd like to test this function or use it, you will need to add the Guzzle library to your project.

 1use Illuminate\Support\Arr;
 2 
 3function checkDomains($domains) {
 4    // Ensure that $domains is an array.
 5    $domains = Arr::wrap($domains);
 6 
 7    // An array to hold our response times.
 8    $responseTimes = [];
 9 
10    foreach ($domains as $domain) {
11        $startTime = microtime(true);
12        // Perform a GET request with the Guzzle HTTP client.
13        with(new GuzzleHttp\Client)->get($domain);
14        $endTime   = microtime(true);
15 
16        // Get the response time in milliseconds.
17        $responseTime = floor(($endTime - $startTime) * 1000);
18 
19        // Add the response time to our results array.
20        $responseTimes[$domain] = $responseTime;
21    }
22 
23    return $responseTimes;
24}

We can use this new checkDomains function like so:

1$responseTimes = checkDomains('https://stillat.com/');

At the time of writing, the checkDomains function returned the following results:

1array: [
2  "https://stillat.com" => 665.0
3]

#Global array_wrap Helper Function

The array_wrap helper function is a shortcut to calling Arr:wrap. This function is declared in the global namespace.

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