[Proposal] Blade @foreach/@empty

[Nirlah]

I thought it would be nice if there was an elegant way to handle empty states using Blade:

@foreach ($users as $user)
    <p>This is user {{ $user->id }}</p>
@empty
    <p>No users yet.<a href="#">Create the first one...</a></p>
@endforeach

Instead of the need to use both if/else and foreach.

[bsteephenson]

An @endempty tag would also make the syntax look cleaner

[barryvdh]

Or similar to Twig, foreach.. else.. endforeach
This was actually in Laravel 3, not sure why it was removed, probably because it wasn't so easy to implement/maintain. See #49

[franzliedke]

@GrahamCampbell The Blade parser does no syntax validation, does it? If you write invalid syntax, you will get some PHP parsing errors.

[franzliedke]

Oh, never mind. Didn't see that it was called @foreach here. It would need to be something different, like @forelse.

[JoostK]

The problem with L3's @forelse was that it may execute a function call twice, i.e. first in the if guard and then in the foreach statement.

I think this can easily be avoided by the following approach:

@foreach($this->getUsers() as $user)
  <li>{{ $user->name }}</li>
@forelse
  <p>No users</p>
@endforelse

<?php $__empty = true; foreach($this->getUsers() as $user): $__empty = false; ?>
  <li><?php echo $user->name; ?></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php if($__empty): ?>
  <p>No users</p>
<?php endif; ?>

So, foreach(...) expands directly into a foreach but with the extra state variable. Note that this variable will then be there even for statement which don't have the @forelse construct, but that isn't that bad (and could be solved by using a different keyword but I'd rather see it like this).

The other expansions are pretty straightforward from the example.

[taylorotwell]

@JoostK if you want to give it a shot, make a pull request. It looks pretty decent to me. You up for it?

[JoostK]

I can do that. I guess I will PR this to 4.2.

[KennedyTedesco]

@JoostK Yes, this is not a breaking change. :)