Arrays: array_shift($arr) or $arr[0]?

Question

Which one would you use?

Basically I only want to get the 1st element from a array, that\'s it.

Answer 1

arrshift is more reliable and will always return the first element in the array, but this also modifies the array by removing that element.

arr[0] will fail if your array doesn't start at the 0 index, but leaves the array itself alone.

A more convoluted but reliable method is:

$keys = array_keys($arr);
$first = $arr[$keys[0]];