Laravel Blade @each directive

The relatively unknown @each function in a very powerful way to loop over data in Laravel Blade templates. It is powerful and much more elegant than @foreach.

@foreach

Suppose you want to loop over all comments on your article. You would probably write something like this:

@if(count($article->comments) > 0) 
    @foreach($article->comments as $comment)
        @include('comments.item')
    @endforeach
@else
    @include('comments.no-items')
@endif

This looks awfully messy. You’re glad there is a better way to do this, with @forelse.

@forelse

@forelse($article->comments as $comment)
    @include('comments.item')
@empty
    @include('comments.no-items')
@endforelse

Better, but still sort of messy. For almost every @forelse that you write, you will have to include the @empty statement. We still have the indentation which makes this very simple task into a block of code. Enter @each

@each

@each('comments.item', $article->comments, 'comment', 'comments.no-items')

That’s it. No conditionals, no indentation.

The arguments are:

  1. The view partial for rendering each element in the array or collection.
  2. The array or collection you want to iterate over.
  3. The variable name that the current element will be assigned to.
  4. [Optional] The view partial that will be rendered if the array or collection is empty.

Because the view partials will have descriptive names of themselves this code is very self-explanatory. No need for a @empty statement when the particle is called comments.no-items, right?

So, rendering a list of articles with their respective comments would look something like this:

// articles/full-list.blade.php
@each('articles.item', $articles, 'article', 'articles.no-items')

// articles/item.blade.php
{{ $article->title}
@each('comments.item', $article->comments, 'comment', 'comments.no-items')

// comments/item.blade.php
{{ comment->author }} wrote: {{ comment->text}}.

According to the docs `@each seems to be available from Laravel 5.1 and newer.

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