Laravel 5 Collections: Determining the Most Common Value in a Collection With mode

In a data set, the mode is the value that appears most often. The mode method will return the mode of the data set contained within the collection; you may also specify a $key to narrow which data field the collection looks at when determining the mode.

#Signature

1public function mode(
2    $key = null
3);

#Example Use

In the following example we look at the most basic usage of the mode method:

1// Create a sample collection.
2$collection = collect([
3    100, 200, 200, 300, 400
4]);
5 
6// Determine the mode.
7$mode = $collection->mode();

After the above code has executed, the $mode variable would contain the value 200.

In the following example, we will look at an example collection containing the names of departments and the number of employees within each department. We will then use the mode method to determine the most common number of employees:

 1$departments = collect([
 2    [
 3        'name' => 'Engineering & Technology',
 4        'employees' => 32
 5    ],
 6    [
 7        'name' => 'Legal',
 8        'employees' => 43
 9    ],
10    [
11        'name' => 'Finance',
12        'employees' => 32
13    ],
14    [
15        'name' => 'Design',
16        'employees' => 17
17    ]
18]);
19 
20$mode = $departments->mode('employees');

Once the above code has executed, the $mode variable would contain the value 32.

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