How to access the nth object in a Laravel collection object? - php

Question

I have a laravel collection object.
I want to use the nth model within it.
How do I access it?
Edit:
I cannot find a suitable method in the laravel documentation. I could iterate the collection in a foreach loop and break when the nth item is found:
foreach($collection as $key => $object)
{
if($key == $nth) {break;}
}
// $object is now the nth one
But this seems messy.
A cleaner way would be to perform the above loop once and create a simple array containing all the objects in the collection. But this seems like unnecessary duplication.
In the laravel collection class documentation, there is a fetch method but I think this fetches an object from the collection matching a primary key, rather than the nth one in the collection.

Answer 1

Seeing as Illuminate\Support\Collection implements ArrayAccess, you should be able to simply use square-bracket notation, ie
$collection[$nth]
This calls offsetGet internally which you can also use
$collection->offsetGet($nth)
and finally, you can use the get method which allows for an optional default value
$collection->get($nth)
// or
$collection->get($nth, 'some default value')

Answer 2

#Phil's answer doesn't quite obtain the nth element, since the keys may be unordered. If you've got an eloquent collection from a db query it'll work fine, but if your keys aren't sequential then you'll need to do something different.
$collection = collect([0 => 'bish', 2 => 'bash']); $collection[1] // Undefined index
Instead we can do $collection->values()[1] // string(4) bash
which uses array_values()
Or even make a macro to do this:
Collection::macro('nthElement', function($offset, $default = null) {
return $this->values()->get($offset, $default);
}):
Example macro usage:
$collection = collect([0 => 'bish', 2 => 'bash']);
$collection->nthElement(1) // string(4) 'bash'
$collection->nthElement(3) // undefined index
$collection->nthElement(3, 'bosh') // string (4) bosh

Answer 3

I am late to this question, but I thought this might be a useful solution for someone.
Collections have the slice method with the following parameters:
$items->slice(whereToStartSlice, sizeOfSlice);
Therefore, if you set the whereToStartSlice parameter at the nth item and the sizeOfSlice to 1 you retrieve the nth item.
Example:
$nthItem = $items->slice($nth,1);

Answer 4

If you are having problems with the collection keeping the indices after sorting... you can make a new collection out of the values of that collection and try accessing the newly indexed collection like you would expect:
e.g. Get the second highest priced item in a collection
$items = collect(
[
"1" => ["name" => "baseball", "price" => 5],
"2" => ["name"=> "bat", "price" => 15],
"3" => ["name" => "glove", "price" => 10]
]
);
collect($items->sortByDesc("price")->values())[1]["name"];
// Result: glove
Similar to morphs answer but not the same. Simply using values() after a sort will not give you the expected results because the indices remain coupled to each item.
Credit to #howtomakeaturn for this solution on the Laravel Github:
https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/1335