Adam Wathan has a new post to his site talking about mapping with collections and customizing the keys when injecting new data into your Laravel collections.

People often ask me, “how do I specify keys when I’m mapping a collection?”

It actually ends up being a pretty interesting topic, so I decided to cover it in a short screencast, as well as in written format below.

He shows how to translate a simple set of data into a much more slimmed down version. He points out that the "map" function could be used but it doesn't allow for setting keys. Instead he talks briefly about how the problem could be solved in Javascript (returning an object instead of an array) and how to use the "reduce" method to filter and reset the data as it goes through the array. He finishes out the post talking about learning from other languages, the "toAssoc" macro on Laravel collections and mapping the data back to an array with a custom macro.