Laravel 5 Collections: Adding an Element to the Beginning of a Collection With prepend

The prepend method will add a a given $value to the beginning of the collection. You can also supply an optional $key that will be used as the key for the new $value when adding an item to the beginning of an associative array. The prepend method returns a reference to the original collection instance.

#Signature

1public function prepend(
2    $value,
3    $key = null
4);

#Example Use

The following code example demonstrates the usage of the prepend method:

1use Illuminate\Support\Collection;
2 
3// Create a new collection instance.
4$collection = new Collection([
5    'XS', 'S', 'M', 'L', 'XL'
6]);
7 
8// Add a new item to the beginning of the collection.
9$collection->prepend('Select a shirt size');

After the above code has executed, the $collection variable would contain a value similar to the following output:

1object(Illuminate\Support\Collection)
2  protected 'items' =>
3    array
4      0 => string 'Select a shirt size'
5      1 => string 'XS'
6      2 => string 'S'
7      3 => string 'M'
8      4 => string 'L'
9      5 => string 'XL'

The following examples demonstrate the usage of the prepend method when supplying an argument for the $key parameter:

1// Create a new collection to work with.
2$collection = collect([
3    'name'  => 'Holiday Jumper',
4    'color' => 'Red'
5]);
6 
7// Add a new item to the beginning of the collection.
8$collection->prepend('XL', 'size');

After the above code has executed, the $collection variable would contain a value similar to the following output:

1Collection {
2  #items: array [
3    "size"  => "XL"
4    "name"  => "Holiday Jumper"
5    "color" => "Red"
6  ]
7}

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