In this episode, we're tackling how to iterate over a range of days within a requested period—perfect for when you want to generate availability per day, like for a booking calendar.
We start by recapping why we need to break up our time slots into individual days rather than having one long, continuous period. This step lets us treat each day separately, which is super helpful when users want to see or book slots on a specific date.
To do this, we set up our start and end dates using Carbon (a handy PHP date/time library) and pass these dates through to our logic. Then, we pull in CarbonPeriod to easily create a collection of dates between our given start and end.
We play around by dumping out the days to see what our code is returning: each entry is now its own distinct day. Using Laravel's collection methods, we iterate through these days to format and display them, proving that we can handle every day in the period individually. This sets us up perfectly for the next steps, where we'll assign time slots to each day specifically.
So, by the end of this episode, we've broken down a date range into separate days and prepped everything to start generating daily time slots! If you're building a calendar-based system, this is a key building block.