Laravel 5 Collections: Converting a Collection Into Something JSON Serializable With jsonSerialize

The jsonSerialize method will convert the contents of the collection into something that be serialized using PHP's json_encode function. This method will iterate the collection's internal array and will evaluate each element in accordance with the following rules:

• If the element implements the JsonSerializable, the results of the jsonSerialize method will be returned;
• If the element implements the "Illuminate\Contracts\Support\Jsonable", the results of the toJson method will be returned;
• If the element implements the "Illuminate\Contracts\Support\Arrayable", the results of the toArray method will be returned;
• If none of the previous rules are satisfied, the element will be returned unaltered.

#Signature

1public function jsonSerialize();

#Example Use

The following code example demonstrates the basic use of the jsonSerialize method:

 1use Illuminate\Support\Collection;
 2 
 3// Create a new collection.
 4$collection = new Collection([
 5    'first', 'second', 'third'
 6]);
 7 
 8// Get the value that should be encoded with
 9// json_encode.
10$value = $collection->jsonSerialize();

The $value variable would contain a value similar to the following output:

1array
2  0 => string 'first'
3  1 => string 'second'
4  2 => string 'third'

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