On his Medium blog Jeff Ochoa has written up a tutorial that want to help you understand pipelines in Laravel, a fluid interface that can be used to pass objects around.

Basically, using laravel pipelines you can pass an object between several classes in a fluid way to perform any type of task and finally return the resulting value once all the “tasks” have been executed.

[...] The most clear example about how pipelines works resides in one of the most used components of the framework itself. I’m talking about middlewares.

He uses a simple middleware as an example, covering how they're just "pipes" in the pipeline of execution. He includes a snippet of code from the Illuminate handling showing its place in the pipeline and gives a more real world example of commenting functionality with a few different pieces of functionality. He shows how this could be refactored into the pipeline handling and what happens at the end of the pipe.

In this recent post to the Laravel News site Eric Barnes introduces a new method that's included in Laravel 5.4.10: the "tap" method.

Laravel 5.4.10 introduces a new tap method on collections which allow you to “tap” into the collection at a specific point and do something with the results while not affecting the main collection.

He includes an example, showing a sample array of user data and how, after converting it into a collection, he can "tap" into it at any point. He tapping pulls out the name of the current record following a "where" to locate the matching value. The quick post ends with a look at how the "tap" method is different from "pipe". Essentially the difference is that using "pipe" returns a different collection, potentially with modified data while "tap" does not.

Michelangelo van Dam has a quick new post to his site talking about popen and pipes in command-line PHP as an alternative to the "exec" functions PHP provides to make command lines calls.

I got a question today about using commands that pipe output to other commands within PHP applications. There are two functions in PHP that are perfect for the task: popen and proc_open. But when you want to run it as a complete process, you can go about using exec, shell_exec, passthru or system and fiddle with escapeshellcmd. But often this looks messy and not reusable. A better approach would be to use "popen".

He includes a code example of how to use this method, showing a call to a command line tool and piping the results back into a PHP variable for later use. You can find out more about the use of popen in the PHP manual and accompanying examples.

Greg Freeman has a post today looking at using streams and STDIN in PHP to handling incoming data (like to a CLI script).

PHP streams are still lacking in documentation and are rarely used compared to other PHP features. This is a shame because they can be really powerful and I have used them to gain a lot of performance when doing things such as processing log files. One of the more powerful features of Linux is the ability to pipe in data from another program, it’s often faster to offload tasks to an existing linux user space program than to do it in PHP and the added benefit is that you gain multi core processing which is not possible with standard PHP.

He talks briefly about the "pipe" character and how it allows you to send the output from one command to another. He shows how to mimic this same kind of input handling in PHP using the "php://stdin" stream and a fopen function call. He gets a bit more in-depth into how the streams work (blocking) and a bit of configuration and data you can get about the current streams. The post finishes with an example of a non-blocking input handler that will automatically end execution if no data is given within three seconds.

Knut Urdalen has posted a new blog item about something he calls "washing emails":

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a simple PHP script to cleanup a list of email addresses. As a web developer you have probably been asked to wash a list of emails from a manager or marketer some times. Here’s the ultimate solution.

His script does a few things - removes duplicates, validates that the email address exists, uses pipes for communication and is as flexible as possible to work on most PHP distributions. You can download the simple script here.

In this new post to his blog Chris Jones looks at an option to increase the performance of your PHP/Oracle application even more - converting a REF CURSOR into a piped data set via the PDO_OCI extension.

REF CURSORs are common in Oracle's stored procedural language PL/SQL. They let you pass around a pointer to a set of query results. However in PHP, PDO_OCI doesn't yet allow fetching from them. [...] One workaround, when you can't rewrite the PL/SQL code to do a normal query, is to write a wrapper function that pipes the output.

He includes an example, creating an example myproc() that contains the query to select the last names of all employees in the table. This procedure is put inside of a package so it can be called directly in the SQL statement and the ref cursor can be automatically piped to output.