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

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);