Shortcut for: $foo = explode(" ", "bla ble bli"); echo $foo[0] - php

Question

is there a way to get the n-th element of a splitted string without using a variable?
My PHP code always looks like this:
$foo = explode(" ", "bla ble bli");
echo $foo[0];
Is there a shorter way maybe like in Python?
print "bla ble bli".split(" ")[0]
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This is what people should be using instead of explode most of the time:
$foo = strtok("bla ble bli", " ");
It cuts off the first string part until the first " ".
If you can't let go of explode, then the closest idiom to accomplish [0] like in Python is:
$foo = current(explode(...));
If it's not just the first element, then it becomes a tad more cumbersome:
$foo = current(array_slice(explode(...), 2)); // element [2]

Answer 2

(Not really an answer per se -- others did answer pretty well)
This is one of the features that should arrive with one of the next versions of PHP (PHP 5.4, maybe).
For more informations, see Features in PHP trunk: Array dereferencing -- quoting one of the given examples :
<?php
function foo() {
return array(1, 2, 3);
}
echo foo()[2]; // prints 3
?>

Answer 3

try this:
its one line:
<?php
echo (($f=explode(" ", "bla ble bli"))?$f[0]:'');
?>
result here:
http://codepad.org/tnhbpYdd

Answer 4

Why not just do:
function splode($string, $delimiter, $index){
$r = explode($delimiter, $string);
return $r[$index];
}
I use like a hojillion little functions like this.

Answer 5

With only one expression I can think of:
echo list($a) = explode(' ', 'a b c') ? $a : '';
echo list($_, $b) = explode(' ', 'a b c') ? $b : '';

Answer 6

Not as far as I know although you could define a function and use that.
function firstWord($string) {
$foo = explode(" ", $string);
return $string;
}

Answer 7

I don't know of a way to do what you want, even though I've wanted to do the same thing many times before. For that specific case you could do
$bar = substr($foo, 0, strpos($foo, " "));
which stops there being one extra variable, but isn't exactly what you wanted.

Answer 8

The following is probably the cleanest way I can think of doing what OP has requested. It defines a function, but no variables of it's own and it'll get the job done for just about any situation:
function at(&$arr, &$pos) { return $arr[$pos]; }
Example usage:
echo at( explode('|', 'a|b|c|d'), 1 ); // Outputs 'b'
The function is a single line of code and wouldn't be hard to commit to memory. If you're only using it once, you can define it in the local scope of where it'll be used to minimize code clutter.
As a slight added benefit, because the function does no checks on $arr or $pos, it'll throw all the same errors that it would if you tried to access a non-existent index for an array, or will even return the individual characters in a string or items in a key-value paired array.

Answer 9

close. the right track is making a function or method for something that gets repeated.
function extract_word($input, $index) {
$input = explode(' ', $input);
return $input[$index];
}
add a third argument of $separater = ' ' if you may have different word separaters.