Sometimes you need to identify the first and last elements of an array for use in a foreach loop. And in PHP this looks set to get a whole lot easier thanks to the new version 7.3, which is currently at Release Candidate status.

In previous versions of PHP you would’ve had to do something like this:

// Go to start of array and get key, for later comparison
reset($array)
$firstkey = key($array);
// Go to end of array and get key, for later comparison
end($array);
$lastkey = key($array);

foreach ($array as $key => $element) {
  // If first element in array
  if ($key === $firstkey)
    echo 'FIRST ELEMENT = '.$element;

  // If last element in array
  if ($key === $lastkey)
    echo 'LAST ELEMENT = '.$element;
} // end foreach

Now in PHP 7.3 and up, there are new functions called array_key_first and array_key_last, so you just need to call those:

foreach($array as $key => $element) {
  // If first element in array
  if ($key === array_key_first($array))
    echo 'FIRST ELEMENT = '.$element;

  // If last element in array
  if ($key === array_key_last($array))
    echo 'LAST ELEMENT = '.$element;
} // end foreach

If nothing else it certainly makes for much neater code.