In short, Yes and No. Not the way we commonly do a variable, but in laravel way yes. It’s a common mistake done by almost all the laravel developer once in a lifetime until the bug appears (Well, you are not counted, if you are exceptional :P). So, let’s explore.
Let’s look at how laravel collection is constructed. Go to your laravel tinker console and try this:
php artisan tinker
Psy Shell v0.9.12 (PHP 7.2.31 — cli) by Justin Hileman
>>> $collection = collect([])
=> Illuminate\Support\Collection {#3164
all: [],
}
You see, when I create an empty collection, laravel still puts an underlying array called ‘all’. This is the manipulator array and contains all the content inside. This array is accessible through the collection all method:
>>> $collection->all() => []
You see, the return is an empty array. But when it’s just the collection, it’s not really empty, it has an underlying content holder.
So, how can we test emptiness of the collection? Well, there are 3 ways.
I) Laravel gives a way to return the number of element in the collection with a collection method calls count(). You can test it against 0 to see if the collection is empty or not
>>> $collection->count() => 0
II) You may use the regular php count() method to return that it doesn’t contain any leaf element and test it against 0:
>>> count($collection) => 0
III) If you are a big fan of ’empty’ and still would like to follow, then you can grab the content of the collection using all method and test it against empty as following:
>>> empty($collection->all()) => true
So, yeah, now you know all the ways 🙂