Laravel 5 Collections: Excluding Collection Elements With except

April 22, 2018 —John Koster

The except method will return all the key/value pairs in the collection where the keys in the collection are not in the supplied $keys array. Internally, this method makes a call to the "Illuminate\Support\Arr:except($array, $keys)" helper function.

#Signature

1public function except(
2 $keys
3);

#Example Use

The following example demonstrates the usage of the except method:

1// Create a new collection.
2$collection = collect([
3 'first_name' => 'John',
4 'last_name' => 'Doe',
5 'password' => 'some_password'
6]);
7 
8// Retrieve all items from the collect
9// except for the password.
10$data = $collection->except(['password']);

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

1Collection {
2 #items: array [
3 "first_name" => "John"
4 "last_name" => "Doe"
5 ]
6}

We can also combine the except method with the toJson method to easily remove sensitive data from information before sending it to an end user:

1$jsonData = $collection->except(['password'])->toJson();

After the above code has executed, the $jsonData variable would hold a value similar to the following JSON string:

1"{"first_name":"John","last_name":"Doe"}"

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