README

This library provides objects and functionality to help with groups of items and data sets.

Check out the API documentation.

Bag and MutableBag

These are object-oriented implementations of arrays.

The goal of these classes:

• Provide functionality on par with built-in array methods
• Provide useful functionality lacking from built-in array methods
• Provide a fluent-like experience
• Make implementing code more readable

Examples

$arr = [
    'debug' => true,
    'color' => 'blue',
    'db' => [
        'driver' => 'sqlite',
    ],
];

$bag = Bag::from($arr)
    ->defaults([
        'debug' => false,
        'color' => 'green',
    ])
    ->replace([
        'color' => 'red',
    ])
;
$bag->get('debug'); // true
$bag->getPath('db/driver'); // "sqlite"
$bag->keys()->join(', '); // "debug, color, db"
$bag->isAssociative(); // true

$colors = MutableBag::of('red', 'blue', 'yellow')
    ->merge(['green', 'orange'])
;
$colors->isIndexed(); // true
$colors->indexOf('yellow'); // 2
$colors[2]; // "yellow"

$colors->prepend('purple');
$colors[] = 'pink';

$colors->first(); // "purple"
$colors->last(); // "pink"

$colors->shuffle()->first(); // one of the colors

$colors->chunk(2); // Bags represented as arrays:
// [ ['purple', 'red'], ['blue', 'yellow'], ['green, 'orange'], ['pink'] ]

$colors->removeFirst(); // "purple"
$colors->removeFirst(); // "red"

These examples only cover half of the functionality. See the API documentation for more.

All methods accepting a collection will accept other Bags, arrays, stdClass, and Traversable objects. This makes it very easy work with any collection-like object.

Hasn't this been done already?

Obviously others think PHP arrays suck as well and have attempted to resolve this.

Symfony's ParameterBag is a good basic map (associative arrays) container but is lacking when it comes to mutating the items around and working with lists.

Doctrine's ArrayCollection is also another, more robust, option. It works well for maps and lists, but still has limited functionality due to needing to interface with a database collection. It also has some annoyances, like getKeys() returns an array instead of another ArrayCollection instance.