Laravel - Responding JSON from Collection after sorted has item index as object key

Question

I don't know what causes the problem, but below is the original PHP code which resulted with the wanted JSON format:

_PHP

return response()->json($model->things, 200);

_JSON

[
    {...},
    {...},
    ...
]

However, when I sorted the collection, the array in JSON became an object.

_PHP

return response()->json($model->things->sortBy("name"), 200);

_JSON

{
    "0": {...},
    "1": {...},
    ...
}

Did I do something wrong? I tried dding the collection in the 2 cases, but the results look the same to me.

RainDev · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-12 19:47:09Z

10

From laravel documentation:

The sortBy method sorts the collection by the given key. The sorted collection keeps the original array keys

so after sortBy() you have something like this:

[2=>'val1', 1 => 'val2', 0 => 'val3']

and it's associative array, and that explains why in json it became an object, and to prevent this you need to use values() method like this:

$model->things->sortBy("name")->values()->all()

second question is why it is not sorted, and you can read this question: json_encode not preserving order

answered Jul 12, 2018 at 19:41

RainDev

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