After years - Back to open source

Mathias — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 19:21:12 +0000

🧩 Back to Open Source: Flexible Data Mapping with `event4u/data-helpers`

After several years working exclusively in startup environments, focusing on product‑driven internal development, I’ve finally found the time and motivation to return to the Open Source community.

To mark this shift, I’ve revived and rebuilt an old idea of mine: a lightweight PHP package that solves a common but often underestimated challenge — accessing and transforming deeply nested data.

Whether you're dealing with messy API responses, preparing clean outputs, or mapping between different internal structures — this package helps you extract and restructure data in a clear and consistent way.

🚀 What does the package do?

The main goal of event4u/data-helpers is to simplify access, mutation and mapping of structured data using dot notation and wildcards.

It’s framework‑agnostic and works well with Laravel, Symfony, or any plain PHP app.

Key features:

🔍 Dot notation access with support for wildcards (*)
🛠️ Helpers to map or mutate data structures
♻️ Reusable mapping definitions
✅ Type-safe, predictable, and testable transformations
🧩 Especially useful for APIs, DTOs, imports and exports

💡 Code Example

Say you get a messy API response like this:

// From this messy API response...
$apiResponse = [
    'data' => [
        'departments' => [
            ['users' => [['email' => 'alice@example.com'], ['email' => 'bob@example.com']]],
            ['users' => [['email' => 'charlie@example.com']]],
        ],
    ],
];

// ...to this clean result in one line
$accessor = new DataAccessor($apiResponse);
$emails = $accessor->get('data.departments.*.users.*.email');

// Result: ['alice@example.com', 'bob@example.com', 'charlie@example.com']

You can also use the Mapper class to define reusable transformations with default values, custom logic, and support for bidirectional mapping (e.g., for transforming requests and responses).

🤝 Looking for Feedback

This is just the beginning — the package already supports many advanced use cases, but I’m actively looking for ideas to improve it further.

If you:

have ideas for features or syntax improvements
encounter edge‑cases or bugs
use it in a real PHP project and would like to share your experience

…I’d love to hear from you!

👉 GitHub: https://github.com/event4u-app/data-helpers
📚 Docs: https://event4u-app.github.io/data-helpers

Thanks for reading — I’m excited to contribute back to the open source community again!

Let me know what you think in the comments 💬