@stevebauman You're right. #54910 (comment)

Should I add a test that specifically looks for null

@phadaphunk Yea I think it'd be worth it! 👍

@stevebauman Done ✅

This could be a breaking change.

As we are revisiting this method, I have a question:

If the idea is to retrieve the value from the first item with a matching key, shouldn't we return null if the first item with a matching key has a null value within that key?

For example, what should this return?

collect([
    ['name' => 'Tim', 'balance' => null],
    ['name' => 'John', 'balance' => 200],
])->value('balance', 'NA'); // null, 200, or NA?

Mind that I am asking what it should return.

Currently, it will return 200, which is the point raised by issue #54910, and is what this PR attempts to fix.

But with the proposed fix, it will still return 200. Even if the first record has the searched key.

If we want to retrieve the first matching key, regardless of its value, this could be a solution:

<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Collection;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Artisan;

Artisan::command('app:test', function () {
    Collection::macro('myValue', function ($key, $default = null) {
        $sentinel = new \stdClass();

        foreach ($this as $item) {
            $value = data_get($item, $key, $sentinel);

            if ($value !== $sentinel) {
                return $value;
            }
        }

        return value($default);
    });

    $collection = collect([
        ['name' => 'Tim', 'balance' => null],
        ['name' => 'John', 'balance' => 200],
    ]);

    dump(
        $collection->value('balance', 'NA'),   // 200
        $collection->value('missing', 'NA'),   // NA
        $collection->myValue('balance', 'NA'), // null
        $collection->myValue('missing', 'NA'), // NA
    );
});

It also aligns better with Builder@value() which will return null if the first record has a null value on the searched column.

Missed it was closed as I was typing a rather long comment...

@stevebauman what do you think of my comment?

@phadaphunk can you send this to master instead?

@rodrigopedra Yes thanks I will send it to master. You can move your discussion to the issue and from there we'll see I could implement it this way as it seems to be a more complex yet more complete fix.

@rodrigopedra Yea I think your approach would be ideal for this adjustment so it works across arrays and objects 👍