Modify a laravel blade variable without displaying it

Question

In my blade code, I need a counter, to give divs that are rendered by a foreach loop unique id's. For that purpose I created a variable in my blade template like this:

{{ $counter = 0 }}

I use it in the html by just outputting it with {{ $counter = 0 }}

and the later on, I increment it like this: {{ $counter++ }}

It all works like a charm, except that at {{ $counter++ }} it's not only incrementing the variable, it's also outputting it to the view.

is there any way to prevent this?

Answer 1

At first adding logic on blade templating is a bad practice, but sometimes we are forced to do, in that case you can just use PHP tags for it like this:

<?php $counter++; ?>

Another way to do it on Laravel 5.4 as docs indicate:

In some situations, it's useful to embed PHP code into your views. You can use the Blade @php directive to execute a block of plain PHP within your template:

@php
   $counter++;
@endphp

If you have your positions on the array keys you can use it on the @foreach like this:

@foreach ($variable as $key => $value) 
    //current position = $key
    # code...
@endforeach