Can you access the retrun directly as an array?

mrforsythexeter

Hi, I don't have to do this often, but seems silly to create a var for it.

is there any way you can do $a = explode('.',$test)[3];

to access the 3rd offset (4th item) directy with out first having to assign the retrun to a var, and then use that var.

laserlight

I do not think so, but having a variable is useful to check that the array returned really has as many elements as you want to access. If you already know this and really want to avoid defining another variable like that, then perhaps you should define a function that takes an array and an index and returns the element at that index.

paulnaj

You could use the same variable twice ...

$value = explode('.', $test);
$value = $value[3];

Not pretty, but one less var...

mrforsythexeter

I havn't tried this but based on the 2 liner, do you think this would work

$var = $var[3] = explode('.',$test);

bpat1434

No, only because this would assign the output of explode to both $var and $var[3]. Here are some simpler examples:

$var1 = 'Hello';
$var2 = 'World';
// var1 equals "Hello", var2 equals "World"


$var1 = $var2 = false;
// var1 and var2 are now the boolean false

$var1 = $var2 = 'Hello';
// var1 and var2 now have the value "Hello"

You could use [man]list/man to give you that same effect; however, if that array isn't formatted properly, the it will fail.

list($var, $var2, $a) = explode('.', $test);
echo $a;

mrforsythexeter

Thanks for the info every one.. always looking for shorter ways to code solutions, I think I will stick with exploding it, checking it is an array.. checking if the key exists and so on.

Weedpacket

bpat1434 wrote:

 list($var, $var2, $a) = explode('.', $test);

And if you're not interested in $var or $var2...

list(,,$a) = explode('.', $test);

But this of course assumes that there are at least three elements in the array.