Laravel 5 Collections: Execute a Callback on the Collection Instance While Returning the Original Collection Instance With tap

The tap method will allow you supply a callback that will receive a copy of the current collection instance. The user supplied function will not modify the original collection, but will return a reference the original collection.

#Signature

1public function tap(
2    callable $callback
3);

#Example Use

In the following example, we will tap into a collection's items, perform some action on them, and return an array containing the original collection's items.

 1// Create a new collection.
 2$collection = collect([
 3    'Alice',
 4    'Bob',
 5    'Charlie'
 6]);
 7
 8$items = $collection->tap(function ($col) {
 9    // We now have access to a copy of
10    // the original collection instance.
11    $col->map(function ($name) {
12        // This will not change the original collection.
13        return mb_strtoupper($name);
14    });
15})->toArray();

After the above code has executed, the $items array will contain the same elements stored within the original collection instance; they will not have been converted to their upper-cased variant.

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