How to return an array and get the first element of it in one line in PHP?

Question

this question is just for fun and maybe learning a PHP shorthand trick (if exists) Let\'s assume that I have this code:

$item = $this->get_item($id);
$item =          


        

Answer 1

You can use reset($array) to reset the internal array position and return the value of the first element.

Answer 2

For the first one, you can do this trick... for other indices, it gets uglier.

list($algo) = explode(':', $password);

I was looking for a more elegant answer but here we are :)

Answer 3

In PHP 5.4 this becomes an easy one-liner

As of PHP 5.4 it is possible to array dereference the result of a function or method call directly. Before it was only possible using a temporary variable.

$firstElement = getArray()[0];

where

function getArray() {
    return array(1, 2, 3);
}

Taken from a slightly modified version of Example #7 from the PHP manual pages (Arrays).

Answer 4

Nope, as far as I know, there is no way to do this in PHP.

What you could do is return an object of a class that has a method getLine(). With that, you could do

$item = $this->prepare_items(array($item))->getLine(0);

you could - I'm not saying it's necessarily always a good idea, but it's becoming more and more popular, probably influenced by jQuery's elegance - also store the results of get_item in the object, and have it return $this to allow for method chaining like so:

$item = $this->get_item($id)->prepare_items()->getLine(0);