Convert Collection Into JSON In Laravel

5 mins0
How to convert collection into JOSN in Laravel

Laravel uses collection classes as a common way to store data. However, when working with APIs, you often need to convert collection into JSON in Laravel to return response data in a format that clients can use.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to transform collection data into JSON strings. This can include model instances or manually created collections. We will explore multiple methods to convert a collection object into a JSON string efficiently.

Here, we will take multiple examples with different methods because it’s based on the use case. Let’s suppose, we are getting data from the database and you need to convert collection data into JSON then you can use the toJson() collection method. Or you need to return JSON data as API response then you can use json() method of the response class.

Last, you want to use the PHP json_encode method on collection then you use it. Let’s take examples for all methods.

Using toJson() Method

The toJson() method is a collection method that converts the collection into JSON strings. You can directly chain it into an Eloquent query and get the value as JSON.

Before using this method we have to get data from Eloquent builder using the get() or find() method. Let’s take an example of the toJson() method:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\User;

class HomeController extends Controller
{
    public function users(){
        $user = User::whereId(1)->get()->toJson();
        //OR
        $user = User::find(1)->toJson();

        return $user;
    }
}

In the above example, we will find a user by ID and convert data into JSON objects. We just chain toJson() method on eloquent query builder.

Using json_encode() method

The json_encode() method is a primary function of PHP itself so we can use it without any dependency on Laravel. It requires only one parameter which is data, there are also some optional flags like JSON_PRETTY_PRINT or JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK which we can pass.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\User;

class HomeController extends Controller
{
    public function users(){
        $users = User::latest()
            ->take(10)
            ->get();

        return json_encode($user);
    }
}

JSON Response Method

The JSON response method uses a response class to convert array or collection data into JSON objects While creating APIs, the json() function is used to convert the collection into JSON and return it as a response.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\User;

class HomeController extends Controller
{
    public function users(){
        $users = User::latest()
            ->take(10)
            ->get();

        return response()->json($user);
    }
}

Conclusion

In this article, we have converted the collection into JSON object in multiple ways like toJson() function, json() method, and json_encode() function.

To handle collection data effectively, you can check if a collection is empty in Laravel using methods like isEmpty() or count().

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