How to use the "sortBy" method to sort a collection by a specific key in illuminate/collections?

To use the "sortBy" method in the Illuminate/Collections package to sort a collection by a specific key, follow these steps:

First, ensure you have the Illuminate/Collections package installed in your Laravel project. You can install it via Composer by running the following command:

composer require illuminate/collections

Import the required Illuminate collections class to your file where you want to sort the collection. Include the following line at the top of your file:

use Illuminate\Support\Collection;

Create a new collection instance. You can either create a collection from an existing array or fetch it from a database query. For this example, let's create a simple collection from an array:

$collection = collect([
    ['name' => 'John', 'age' => 25],
    ['name' => 'Jane', 'age' => 30],
    ['name' => 'Alice', 'age' => 20]
]);

Use the "sortBy" method to sort the collection by a specific key. The "sortBy" method requires a callback function that returns the value you want to sort by. In this case, let's sort the collection by the "age" key:

$sorted = $collection->sortBy(function ($item, $key) {
    return $item['age'];
});

The "sortBy" method will return a new sorted collection. You can retrieve the sorted array by using the "all" method:

$sortedArray = $sorted->all();

print_r($sortedArray);

The output of the above code will be:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [name] => Alice
            [age] => 20
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [name] => John
            [age] => 25
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [name] => Jane
            [age] => 30
        )

)

The collection is now sorted in ascending order by the "age" key. You can use the "sortByDesc" method to sort the collection in descending order instead.