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Meta Tag Bag

A PHP class for collecting and manipulating HTML meta tags before echoing in the <head>. Works well with Laravel, and without.

Inspired by Laravel's MessageBag.

composer require bjuppa/metatagbag

Table of contents

Creating a MetaTagBag

use Bjuppa\MetaTagBag\MetaTagBag;

$bag = new MetaTagBag(
  ['name' => 'description', 'content' => 'A description'],
  ['name' => 'keywords', 'content' => 'key,words']
);

// ...or using a static creator:

$bag = MetaTagBag::make(
  ['name' => 'description', 'content' => 'A description'],
  ['name' => 'keywords', 'content' => 'key,words']
);

Input Formats

All methods that operate on some kind of list of meta tags will accept almost any type of map-like (key-value) input, optionally nested in some kind of list.

Tags can be in separate arguments

The most terse syntax can be seen in the creation examples above, where multiple tags are supplied, each as its own argument to the method.

Lists of tags are flattened

If some kind of nested list is encountered, it will be flattened so that any item lacking a "string" key will become its own tag in the resulting one-dimensional list of tags.

$bag = new MetaTagBag(
  [
    ['name' => 'description', 'content' => 'A description'],
    ['name' => 'keywords', 'content' => 'key,words'],
    [
      ['name' => 'nested', 'content' => 'This will end up in the top-level with the other tags'],
    ]
  ]
);

Json strings are deserialized

If a string is encountered within a supplied list, attempts will be made to deserialize it from json.

MetaTagBag::make('[{"name":"description","content":"A description"},{"name":"keywords","content":["key","words"]}]');

Objects are converted to arrays

If an object is encountered within a supplied list, it will be converted to an array, and merged into the flattened list. Implementations of Laravel's Arrayable, like Laravel's Collection and other MetaTagBags will work just fine. Implementations of Bjuppa\MetaTagBag\Contracts\MetaTagProvider will pull out that instance's MetaTagBag.

MetaTagBag::make(new MetaTagBag(['name' => 'description', 'content' => 'A description']));

HTML Output

The MetaTagBag should usually be rendered first within the <head> element, before any other elements like <title>. This is because it may contain a charset meta tag that should come before any other content.

// Return a string of HTML tags from the bag's contents
$bag->toHtml();

MetaTagBag implements Laravel's Htmlable contract so in a Blade template you can echo the tags by putting any instance within curly braces:

<head>
{{ Bjuppa\MetaTagBag\MetaTagBag::make(['name' => 'description', 'content' => 'A description']) }}
<title>Page title</title>
</head>

Casting a MetaTagBag to string will also bring out the HTML representation:

echo $bag; //Implicit string casting
$html = (string) $bag; //Explicit string casting

Output of comma-separated list attributes

For HTML, any array attribute will be imploded into a comma-separated list. This can for example be used with a name="keywords" meta tag, where the keywords in the content attribute can be treated as a list until the time of rendering.

Adding Tags

The add(...$tags) method will modify the MetaTagBag instance, adding any tags supplied without checking for duplicates.

The merge(...$tags) method will also modify the MetaTagBag instance, but will overwrite any existing tags having the same name, http-equiv, itemprop, or property attributes.

Merging array attributes

If a tag to be merged has an array as its content attribute, that array will be merged with the content of any existing matching tag in the bag. This can for example be used with name="keywords" meta tags, where one may want to add keywords, rather than overwriting them.

Removing Tags

The forget(...$attributes) method will remove all matching tags from the MetaTagBag instance.

Filtering Tags

The match(...$attributes) method can be used to filter out matching tags into a new MetaTagBag.

The unique() method returns a new MetaTagBag where all duplicate tags have been removed (keeping the last).

In addition, if unique(...$attributes) is called with arguments, matching tags will only appear once in the returned MetaTagBag (also keeping the last).

Inspecting a MetaTagBag

The methods count(...$attributes) and has(...$attributes) can be used to count matching tags or check if any matching tags exist in a bag. Of course, count() can be called without arguments to return the total number of tags in the bag, while calling has() without arguments will always return false.

The content($attributes) method will pull out the value of the content attribute of the last matching tag. It's a wrapper around getLastMatchingAttributeValue($attributeToGet, $attributesToMatch) that does the same for any attribute.

Sorting Tags

The sort() method called without arguments will return a new MetaTagBag instance where charset and http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" tags are placed first.

If a callback is given, it will be used just like PHP's uasort parameters.

Optional Manipulation

The pipe(callable $callback) method passes the MetaTagBag to the given callback and returns the result. For example it can be used to fluently check if a MetaTagBag contains some tag, and if so add or remove some other tag.

Converting to json

MetaTagBag is JsonSerializable so instances can be supplied directly to PHP's json_encode() function. Also, because MetaTagBag implements Laravel's Jsonable contract, there's also the toJson() method.

Alternative packages

For a more opinionated end-to-end solution for meta tags in Laravel apps you should check out butschster/LaravelMetaTags.