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

Starting with PHP 7.3.0 it's possible to do without resetting the internal pointer. You would use array_key_first. If you're sure that your array has values it in then you can just do:

$first = $array[array_key_first($array)];

More likely, you'll want to handle the case where the array is empty:

$first = (empty($array)) ? $default : $array[array_key_first($array)];