24th March 2013 - 8 minutes read time
Getting the first or last item from an array in PHP is usually quite easy. If you create an array and then add a bunch of values to it then the array index will increment by 1 for every element you add. This means that in order to get the first element from an array you just reference the default starting position (0). To get the last item in the array the index key will be the length of the array, minus 1. Here is some example code showing this.
<?php
$array = array();
$array[] = 1;
$array[] = 2;
// get the first item in the array
print $array[0]; // prints 1
// get the last item in the array
print $array[count($array) - 1]; // prints 2
Things become slightly more complicated when the array has non standard key values. Take the following array for example in which the array count it started at 1.
