Question

Consider the following array

$array = array('fruit'     => 'apple',
               'vegetable' => 'potato',
               'dairy'     => 'cheese');

I wanted to use array_pop to get the last key/value pair.

However, one will note that after the following

$last = array_pop($array);

var_dump($last);

It will output only the value (string(6) "cheese")

How can I “pop” the last pair from the array, preserving the key/value array structure?

Answer 1

Check out array_slice() http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-slice.php

Last argument true is to preserve keys.

When you pass the offset as negative, it starts from the end. It’s a nice trick to get last elements without counting the total.

$array = [
    "a" => 1,
    "b" => 2,
    "c" => 3,
];

$lastElementWithKey = array_slice($array, -1, 1, true);

print_r($lastElementWithKey);

Outputs:

Array
(
    [c] => 3
)