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

Fake loop that breaks on the first iteration:

$key = $value = NULL;
foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
    break;
}

echo "$key = $value\n";

Or use each() (warning: deprecated as of PHP 7.2.0):

reset($array);
list($key, $value) = each($array);

echo "$key = $value\n";