Re: [RFC] array_key_(first|last|index) functions proposal

> On Jan 1, 2016, at 16:38, Bishop Bettini <bishop@php.net> wrote: > > On Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 3:44 PM, John Bafford <jbafford@zort.net> wrote: > Happy New Year, everyone! > > I’d like to present the first new PHP RFC for this year, a proposal to add functions to > easily get the first, last, or an arbitrary key (and value) by index from an array, taking advantage > of PHP’s property that arrays are ordered maps. > > Thanks for submitting this RFC! I am +1, with one quibble: obtaining the value by reference > seems non-sequitur to the function itself and PHP in general. IOW, this seems more PHPesque to me: > > // get the next to last value > $key = array_key_index($arr, -2); > $val = $arr[$key]; > > Sincerely, > bishop While relatively rare for PHP, these aren't the only functions that have an optional second return value by reference. (preg_match, preg_replace, str_replace, among others.) I agree that that’s a bit unusual in terms of PHP, but, if you actually need both the key and the value, this way you can do it in one call, rather than having to access the array and pull the value out of it separately. The C code already has a reference to the hashtable bucket, so returning the value if it’s needed is trivial. -John