New Merge and Replace Collection Methods in Laravel 5.8.28

The Laravel team released v5.8.28 yesterday with new collection methods for merge and replacement, and the Tappable trait on TestResponse.

Before we get to the new collection methods, the TestResponse class is now tappable, which provides a different way of making assertions on the test response:

// With tap
$this->getJson('/api/users/index')
    ->assertStatus(200)
    ->tap(function (TestResponse $response) {
        $this->assertMatchesJsonSnapshot($response);
    });
 
// Without tap
$response = $this->getJson('/api/users/index')
    ->assertStatus(200);
 
$this->assertMatchesJsonSnapshot($response);

Next, a few new collection methods were added, including mergeRecursive(), replace(), and replaceRecursive().

The mergeRecursive() method implements the basic PHP array_merge_recursive behavior on a collection.

Next, the replace() and replaceRecursive() methods, which implements the basic array_replace and array_replace_recursive on collections respectively. Here’s an example from the test cases which might illustrate how these methods work:

$c = new Collection(['a', 'b', 'c']);
$this->assertEquals(
    ['a', 'd', 'e'],
    $c->replace([1 => 'd', 2 => 'e'])->all()
);

Last, a new session only() method was added to specify and only retrieve certain session keys:

$session->only(['example1', 'example2']);

You can see the whole diff between 5.8.27 and 5.8.28 on GitHub. The full release notes for Laravel 5.8 are available in the GitHub 5.8 changelog :

v5.8.28

Added

Make TestResponse tappable (#29033)
Added Support\Collection::mergeRecursive() method (#29084)
Added Support\Collection::replace() and Support\Collection::replaceRecursive() methods (#29088)
Added Session\Store::only() method (#29107)