Laravel 5 Collections: Converting a Collection to JSON With PHP's Magic __toString Method

When a Collection instance is cast into a string, its JSON representation is returned as the result. Internally this is accomplished by returning the results of the collection's toJson method.

1use Illuminate\Support\Collection;
2
3// Create a new collection instance.
4$collection = new Collection([
5    'name' => 'Flo'
6]);
7
8// Cast the collection to a string.
9$stringValue = (string) $collection;

After the above code has executed, the $stringValue variable will contain the following value:

1{"name":"Flo"}

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