How to Count and Detect Empty Laravel Eloquent Collections?

Introduction

The Eloquent ORM included with Laravel provides you with an easy way of interacting with your database. This simplifies all CRUD (Create, read, update, and delete) operations and any other database queries.

Laravel provides a lot of handy methods that you could use to work with your Eloquent collections.

In this tutorial, you will learn how count and detect empty Laravel Eloquent collections!

Prerequisites

Before you start, you would need to have a Laravel application up and running.

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We will use a model called Post as an example in this tutorial.

Check if a collection is empty

In order to check if a collection is empty, you could use the isEmpty() method. This would look as follows:

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$posts= Model::where('active', true)->get();

if ($posts->isEmpty($posts)) {
    // Returns true when there are *no* posts
}

Check if a collection is not empty

Similar to the isEmpty() method, there is a isNotEmpty() method. The syntax is the same:

$posts = Model::where('active', true)->get();

if ($posts->isNotEmpty($posts)) {
    // Returns true when there are posts
}

This could be quite handy when displaying the posts on a website for example, that way you could indicate that the user has not yet added any posts.

Counting the records of a collection

With SQL if you wanted to get how many records match a specific query, you could use the COUNT(*) function, the syntax would look like this:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM posts WHERE active='1';

In case that you had 5 active posts, the result would be 5.

When counting the total elements in a collection, the method is also called count(). The syntax would look like this:

$posts = Model::where('active', true)->get();

if ($posts->count() > 0) {
    // More than 0 posts
} else {
    / 0 posts
}

The count() method basically returns the total number of records in result.

If you wanted to check if check a specific record is “not null” with Laravel Eloquent make sure to check out this post here.

Conclusion

If you are just getting started with Laravel, make sure to check out this introduction course here:

Getting started with Laravel

If you want to learn more about PHP in general, make sure to check out this free PHP basics course here.