Creating Custom Pagination from an Array in Laravel

Laravel provides excellent pagination tools for database queries, but sometimes you need to paginate a regular array. Here's how to create custom pagination from an array in Laravel:

Method 1: Using Laravel's Paginator

php

use Illuminate\Pagination\LengthAwarePaginator;
use Illuminate\Pagination\Paginator;
use Illuminate\Support\Collection;

// Your original array
$items = ['item1', 'item2', 'item3', 'item4', 'item5', 'item6', 'item7'];

// Current page (default to 1 if not set)
$currentPage = LengthAwarePaginator::resolveCurrentPage();
// Number of items per page
$perPage = 3;
// Slice the array to get the items to display
$currentItems = array_slice($items, ($currentPage - 1) * $perPage, $perPage);

// Create our paginator
$paginatedItems = new LengthAwarePaginator(
    $currentItems, 
    count($items), 
    $perPage, 
    $currentPage, 
    [
        'path' => LengthAwarePaginator::resolveCurrentPath()
    ]
);

Method 2: Using Collections (Laravel 8+)

php

use Illuminate\Pagination\Paginator;

// Convert array to collection
$collection = collect(['item1', 'item2', 'item3', 'item4', 'item5', 'item6', 'item7']);

// Paginate the collection
$perPage = 3;
$currentPage = Paginator::resolveCurrentPage() ?: 1;
$paginatedItems = $collection->slice(($currentPage - 1) * $perPage, $perPage)->all();

$paginator = new LengthAwarePaginator(
    $paginatedItems,
    $collection->count(),
    $perPage,
    $currentPage,
    ['path' => Paginator::resolveCurrentPath()]
);

Method 3: Using a Helper Function

You can create a helper function in your app to reuse this functionality:

php

function paginateArray($items, $perPage = 15, $page = null, $options = [])
{
    $page = $page ?: (Paginator::resolveCurrentPage() ?: 1);
    $items = $items instanceof Collection ? $items : Collection::make($items);
    
    return new LengthAwarePaginator(
        $items->forPage($page, $perPage),
        $items->count(),
        $perPage,
        $page,
        $options
    );
}

// Then use it like this:
$paginatedItems = paginateArray($yourArray, 5);

Displaying in Blade

In your Blade view, you can display the paginated items and links:

php

@foreach($paginatedItems as $item)
    <div>{{ $item }}</div>
@endforeach

{{ $paginatedItems->links() }}

Customizing the Pagination View

If you want to customize how the pagination links look:

1. Publish the pagination views:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laravel-pagination

2. Then modify the views in resources/views/vendor/pagination/