What is array_shift?

2/17/2012

array_shift — Shift an element off the beginning of array
Returns the shifted value, or NULL if array is empty or is not an array.

Example:
<?php
$stack = array("orange", "banana", "apple", "raspberry");
$fruit = array_shift($stack);
print_r($stack);
?>

O/P:
Array
(
    [0] => banana
    [1] => apple
    [2] => raspberry
)

1 Comment

Paul

9/27/2012 05:55:10 am

I've found plenty of articles like this explaining what it does, but not why. What use is it? Why would you want to get rid of the orange out of the array (in your example)?

My only line of thinking applies to my own case where I have a text file with many lines which are each delimited by the pipe character. array_shift would, effectively, eliminate the first line so... could I use that first line to store the field names - rather like in Excel when you sort a table and your tell it that the first row is the header row?

What is array_shift?

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