Tappable and pipeable fluent strings in Laravel 8.x
The fluent string operations were introduced back in the release of Laravel 7 which offered a more object-oriented, fluent string manipulation library built on top of Illuminate\Support\Str functions. To use this fluent API, you’d need to use the Illuminate\Support\Str::of method which creates a fluent Illuminate\Support\Stringable object.
Once done, an array of various string manipulation methods can be chained onto the object. So, the above example can be re-written like so.
// Generate a file name from the input string
// and change the extension to .html
use Illuminate\Support\Str;
$input = 'this is test file.php';
$output = Str::of($input)
->replaceLast('php', 'html')
->camel();
// thisIsTestFile.html
Pipeable strings
Now, with one of the minor release of Laravel 8.x, two new methods were introduced. One of them is the pipe method.
Essentially, the pipe method allows you to transform the string by passing its current value to the given callable like so.
So, if you want to call htmlentities function on the given string, you can do it like so.
$htmlEntitites = Str::of('this is <b>bold</b>')
->pipe('htmlentities'); // callable
// Outputs: this is <b>bold</b>
You can also pass in a closure to the pipe method like so.
$hash = Str::of('Harry Potter')->pipe(function ($str) {
return md5($str);
});
// Outputs: 6eb2dc222c508599d75e211d16556af8
Tappable strings
Sometimes, you might want to just use the value of the string in the middle of the fluent operations without affecting its value. For instance, to log the value of the string.
To do so, a method called tap has been introduced. This is similar to the tap collection method which utilizes the Illuminate\Support\Traits\Tappable trait to implement this ability.
To get started, you would need to pass a closure to the tap method. The closure would in turn receive the original string as its only argument and you can then examine and interact with the string while not affecting the string itself like so.
$hashEntity = Str::of('foo > bar')
->pipe('htmlentities')
->tap(fn ($str) => Log::info('Origin str: ' . $str))
->pipe('md5');
As you can tell, the original string is returned by the tap method regardless of what is returned by the closure.
So, the equivalent of the previous code would look like the following.
$str = 'foo > bar';
$str = htmlentities($str);
Log::info('Origin str:' . $str);
$str = md5($str);
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