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phplaravelsquare-bracket

laravel php square brackets definition

I'm trying to understand what the square brackets mean when trying to seed a database in Laravel. If I have a table with 2 fields title and body I'm wondering why square brackets are used instead of array(). Are the square brackets used for a short form or for organization? seems that square brackets aren't just used to seed a database.

public function run()
{
    $posts = [
      [ 'title' => 'My first post', 'body' => 'My post' ],
      [ 'title' => 'My second post', 'body' => 'My post' ]
    ];
    DB::table('posts')->insert($posts);
}
Solution

  • This is the same as:

    public function run()
{
    $posts = array(
      array( 'title' => 'My first post', 'body' => 'My post' ),
      array( 'title' => 'My second post', 'body' => 'My post' )
    );
    DB::table('posts')->insert($posts);
}

    It is the newer (>= PHP 5.4) short way of defining an array.