Cleaning up dates within Laravel Blade

TL;DR

So basically, you can use a Custom Echo Handler to apply the same datetime format when printing Carbon instances within blade files.

Instead of have something like this:

<tr>
    <td>{{ $user->created_at->format('m/d/Y H:i') }}</td>
    <td>{{ $user->updated_at->format('m/d/Y H:i') }}</td>
    <td>{{ $user->deleted_at->format('m/d/Y H:i') }}</td>
    <td>{{ $user->email_verified_at->format('m/d/Y H:i') }}</td>
</tr>

You can have this:

<tr>
    <td>{{ $user->created_at }}</td>
    <td>{{ $user->updated_at }}</td>
    <td>{{ $user->deleted_at }}</td>
    <td>{{ $user->email_verified_at }}</td>
</tr>

By doing this:

// AppServiceProvider.php

use Illuminate\Support\Carbon;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Blade;

public function boot(): void
{
    Blade::stringable(function (Carbon $carbon) {
        return $carbon->format('m/d/Y H:i');
    });
}

And that's it.

Read the Full Thing

I went to review some pull requests, and there was one that had many carbon dates repeating the output format to display in the right US format.

There isn't a real problem doing it that way; it's very straightforward. But it's boring. Can it be simpler? Let's give it a try.

First, I tried to create a class that would inherit from the Carbon instance and override the __toString method. You can do it in the DateFactory by informing which class you want to use as concrete.

\Illuminate\Support\DateFactory::useClass(MyCarbonDate::class);

I didn't like the idea of ending with a new class just to prevent me from typing the format of the datetimes. Seems like overengineering, so I decided to move on.

Also, sniffing a little bit, I found that you can set a "toString" strategy using the Date facade:

\Illuminate\Support\Facades\Date::setToStringFormat('m/d/Y H:i')

But who can say that it won't break anything else in the future, like, I don't know, some inner Laravel hydration thing.

I need a simpler solution and don't want to reinvent the wheel. So I remember about Laravel Eloquent Casting and I saw the Date Casting. That is what I want!

Eventually the code didn't work, and I went back to the docs to figure it why, and that was the reason:

This format will be used when the model is serialized to an array or JSON

In summary, this is going to work through API Resources.

Ok, maybe I'm overthinking this. Forget about it, let's move on. I started to do another daily task. But my brain still didn't give up; I was intrigued. How it's possible that anyone wanted to do this in their blade files?

Ok, let's take only 5 minutes to look again at the docs, maybe I miss something. And I did :D

At the blade section I could find the Custom Echo Handlers

This closure should type-hint the type of object that it is responsible for rendering.

But wait, it isn't working. Well, clearing the cache sometimes solves things. So I did:

php artisan view:clear

And it works!

It's nice to only type the variable that you wanna print, without always having to type the format every time, and with a chance to misspell the format. Additionally, if in the future I support another locale, I could even provide different formats based on this, something like:

Blade::stringable(function (Carbon $carbon) {
    if (app()->getLocale() !== 'en') {
        return $carbon->locale(app()->getLocale())->format('Y-m-d H:i');
    }

    return $carbon->format('m/d/Y H:i');
});

That's all, folks.