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

There's a few options. array_shift() will return the first element, but it will also remove the first element from the array.

$first = array_shift($array);

current() will return the value of the array that its internal memory pointer is pointing to, which is the first element by default.

$first = current($array);

If you want to make sure that it is pointing to the first element, you can always use reset().

reset($array);
$first = current($array);