eboreum/collections

Wish you had generics in PHP? This library provides a sensible means of managing collections of data (i.e. arrays with restrictions), immutably, until such a time that PHP generics are bestowed upon us.

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github.com/eboreum/collections

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2.0.0 2025-04-17 11:17 UTC

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MIT c993aa75dc259470fecfc98e87f7026f4525217e

This package is auto-updated.

Last update: 2025-04-17 11:22:57 UTC

README

license build Code Coverage PHPStan Level

Wish you had generics in PHP? This library provides a sensible means of managing collections of data (i.e. arrays with restrictions), immutably, until such a time that PHP generics are bestowed upon us.

Comes fully equipped with phpstan generics annotations. For details, see: https://phpstan.org/blog/generics-in-php-using-phpdocs

The main goals of this library are:

  1. Accuracy.
    • You know with certainty what the collections in your code base can and must contain.
  2. Safety.
    • Immutability prevents unintentional modifications of collections.
    • You get an exception as soon as an invalid element is encountered.

It is not intended for speed. If you need speed in certain areas, you still have e.g. raw array manipulation you can rely on.

Requirements

"php": "^8.3",
"eboreum/caster": "^2.1",
"eboreum/exceptional": "^2.0"

For more information, see the composer.json file.

Installation

Via Composer (https://packagist.org/packages/eboreum/collections):

composer install eboreum/collections

Via GitHub:

git clone git@github.com:eboreum/collections.git

Fundamentals

This library has two core components:

  1. The class Eboreum\Collections\Collection.
  2. The interface Eboreum\Collections\Contract\CollectionInterface.

Eboreum\Collections\Collection by itself imposes no restrictions and may used for storing any data type. It can be thought of as a fancy array. However, it has two crucial differences and advantages over simple arrays: It's immutable and it's type hinted, including annotations for generics (https://phpstan.org/blog/generics-in-php-using-phpdocs).

The true power of this library shows once you start making collection classes, extending Eboreum\Collections\Collection, which have restrictions.

This library comes equipped with the following simple data type collection classes:

  • Eboreum\Collections\FloatCollection: A collection, which only ever contains float numbers.
  • Eboreum\Collections\IntegerCollection: A collection, which only ever contains integers.
  • Eboreum\Collections\ObjectCollection: A collection, which only ever contains objects – any objects. More on how to make collections for specific class instances below.
  • Eboreum\Collections\StringCollection: A collection, which only ever contains strings.

The real shine comes when we start making restrictions on the contents of the collection classes, for instance restrictions on specific classes.

This library has the following predefined class collections, all located under the namespace \Eboreum\Collections\Object_:

  • ClosureCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \Closure.
  • DateTimeCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \DateTime.
  • DateTimeImmutableCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \DateTimeImmutable.
  • DateTimeInterfaceCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \DateTimeInterface.
  • DirectoryCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \Directory.
  • ErrorCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \Error.
  • ExceptionCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \Exception.
  • SplFileInfoCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \SplFileInfo.
  • SplFileObjectCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \SplFileObject.
  • ThrowableCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \Throwable.
  • stdClassCollection: A collection, which may and will only ever contain instances of \stdClass.

You may use the above files as inspiration on how to build your own specific class collections.

The above classes utilize the abstract class \Eboreum\Collections\Abstraction\AbstractNamedClassOrInterfaceCollection and subsequently the interface \Eboreum\Collections\Contract\ObjectCollectionInterface.

Make collections for anything – not just classes

You may make restrictions for anything – not just classes – including unions (https://php.watch/versions/8.0/union-types). Essentially, you merely have to override the isElementAccepted method in the collection class you are implementing.

Need something that will accept both integers and float numbers (a union)?

Simply do the following:

/**
 * {@inheritDoc}
 */
public static function isElementAccepted($element): bool
{
    return is_int($element) || is_float($element);
}

Do remember: If you utilize phpstan, you should also add and/or update the @template and its references throughout your custom collection class.

You should also override methods such as current, find, first, etc. with a suitable return type. For instance:

PHP ^8.1:

/**
 * {@inheritDoc}
 */
public function current(): int|float
{
    // ...
}

Notice: Intersection types (https://php.watch/versions/8.1/intersection-types) are not supported as they are not supported by PHP 8 due to https://wiki.php.net/rfc/nullable_intersection_types having been declined.

The reason is that methods such as current, find, first, etc. cannot have nullable return types when handling intersections.

Why is immutability necessary?

Simply put: You unintentionally risk changing mutable ("non-immutable") objects when they are being passed around the code base. You and your team may know not to change a mutable object in code bases you control, but third-party libraries (e.g. via Composer) certainly will not respect your rules. Eventually, someone in your team will forget about your "do-not-change" rule and introduce an ugly bug, which often times is hard to track down.

Real-world example of a mutable object incident

Imagine you have a database ORM (Doctrine, Eloquent, etc.). If you use DateTime instead of DateTimeImmutable, passing that instance of DateTime around may change it. Consider this: The instance of DateTime was used to set an end date from which point a user can no longer log in to your application. The same instance of DateTime was used across 100 users (e.g. for optimization reasons). Now your code, because of the change on the DateTime instance, inadvertently blocked 100 users from using your application. Such a type of bug is very hard to find the root cause for.

Tests

Test/development requirements

"phpstan/phpstan": "^2.1.5",
"phpunit/phpunit": "^12.1",
"slevomat/coding-standard": "8.15.0",
"squizlabs/php_codesniffer": "3.12.2",
"symfony/polyfill-intl-icu": "^1.31"

Running tests

For all unit tests, first follow these steps:

cd tests
php ../vendor/bin/phpunit

License & Disclaimer

See LICENSE file. Basically: Use this library at your own risk.

Contributing

We prefer that you create a ticket and or a pull request at https://github.com/eboreum/collections, and have a discussion about a feature or bug here.

Version branches

  • 2.x = main
  • 1.x

No \ArrayAccess!

This library does not and will not utilize \ArrayAccess (https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.arrayaccess.php).

It goes against the immutable nature of this library, it's a little bit evil, and it makes code unnecessarily obscure.

Credits

Authors

Acknowledgements

doctrine/collections

This library is greatly inspired by https://packagist.org/packages/doctrine/collections (https://github.com/doctrine/collections) and some of the code is indeed copied from that library (acknowledged by inclusion of the LICENSE file contents at the top of select files, as required by https://github.com/doctrine/collections/blob/94918256daa6ac99c7e5774720c0e76f01936bda/LICENSE).

Laravel collection

For certain methods, we have also drawn inspiration from https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/collections.