How to get the first item from an associative PHP array?

Question

If I had an array like:

$array[\'foo\'] = 400;
$array[\'bar\'] = \'xyz\';

And I wanted to get the first item out of that array without knowing

Answer 1

Just so that we have some other options: reset($arr); good enough if you're not trying to keep the array pointer in place, and with very large arrays it incurs an minimal amount of overhead. That said, there are some problems with it:

$arr = array(1,2);
current($arr); // 1
next($arr);    // 2
current($arr); // 2
reset($arr);   // 1
current($arr); // 1 !This was 2 before! We've changed the array's pointer.

The way to do this without changing the pointer:

$arr[reset(array_keys($arr))]; // OR
reset(array_values($arr));

The benefit of $arr[reset(array_keys($arr))]; is that it raises an warning if the array is actually empty.