Question

This is as equally a drupal question as a PHP question, I assume.

I have the following print_r($node) array

stdClass Object
(
    [vid] => 4
...
    [field_imgleft] => Array
            (
            [und] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [value] => defaultimgleft
                            [format] => 
                            [safe_value] => defaultimgleft
                        )
                )
        )
)

field_imgleft is a field in the content type of the node. Since there will only be one value, [0] is the max for that array. I’m trying to return the value of [value] to a variable, but I am having no such luck with node-> methods or node[…] and so on.

Answer 1

There’s a built in API function to extract field values from an entity: field_get_items().

You can use it like so:

$items = field_get_items('node', $node, 'field_imgleft');

$first_item = array_shift($items);

$value = $first_item['value'];

This method is recommended over accessing the array directly as it takes care of the field translation for you…no need to worry about using 'und' any more.