Get the first element of an array

Question

I have an array:

array( 4 => \'apple\', 7 => \'orange\', 13 => \'plum\' )

I would like to get the first element of this array. Expect

Answer 1

PHP 7.3 added two functions for getting the first and the last key of an array directly without modification of the original array and without creating any temporary objects:

• array_key_first
• array_key_last

Apart from being semantically meaningful, these functions don't even move the array pointer (as foreach would do).

Having the keys, one can get the values by the keys directly.

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Examples (all of them require PHP 7.3+)

Getting the first/last key and value:

$my_array = ['IT', 'rules', 'the', 'world'];

$first_key = array_key_first($my_array);
$first_value = $my_array[$first_key];

$last_key = array_key_last($my_array);
$last_value = $my_array[$last_key];

Getting the first/last value as one-liners, assuming the array cannot be empty:

$first_value = $my_array[ array_key_first($my_array) ];

$last_value = $my_array[ array_key_last($my_array) ];

Getting the first/last value as one-liners, with defaults for empty arrays:

$first_value = empty($my_array) ? 'default' : $my_array[ array_key_first($my_array) ];

$last_value = empty($my_array) ? 'default' : $my_array[ array_key_last($my_array) ];

Answer 2

PHP 5.4+:

array_values($array)[0];

Answer 3

$first_value = reset($array); // First element's value
$first_key = key($array); // First element's key

Answer 4

From Laravel's helpers:

function head($array)
{
    return reset($array);
}

The array being passed by value to the function, the reset() affects the internal pointer of a copy of the array, and it doesn't touch the original array (note it returns false if the array is empty).

Usage example:

$data = ['foo', 'bar', 'baz'];

current($data); // foo
next($data); // bar
head($data); // foo
next($data); // baz

Also, here is an alternative. It's very marginally faster, but more interesting. It lets easily change the default value if the array is empty:

function head($array, $default = null)
{
    foreach ($array as $item) {
        return $item;
    }
    return $default;
}

---

For the record, here is another answer of mine, for the array's last element.

Answer 5

Keep this simple! There are lots of correct answers here, but to minimize all the confusion, these two work and reduce a lot of overhead:

key($array) gets the first key of an array
current($array) gets the first value of an array

EDIT:
Regarding the comments below. The following example will output: string(13) "PHP code test"

$array = array
(
   '1'           => 'PHP code test',  
   'foo'         => 'bar', 5 , 5 => 89009, 
   'case'        => 'Random Stuff: '.rand(100,999),
   'PHP Version' => phpversion(),
   0             => 'ending text here'
);

var_dump(current($array));

Answer 6

$arr = array( 4 => 'apple', 7 => 'orange', 13 => 'plum' );
foreach($arr as $first) break;
echo $first;

Output:

apple