php - Get the first element of an array

This is not so simple response in the real world. Suppose that we have these examples of possible responses that you can find in some libraries.

$array1 = array();
$array2 = array(1,2,3,4);
$array3 = array('hello'=>'world', 'foo'=>'bar');
$array4 = null;
var_dump('reset1', reset($array1));
var_dump('reset2', reset($array2));
var_dump('reset3', reset($array3));
var_dump('reset4', reset($array4)); // Warning
var_dump('array_shift1', array_shift($array1));
var_dump('array_shift2', array_shift($array2));
var_dump('array_shift3', array_shift($array3));
var_dump('array_shift4', array_shift($array4)); // Warning
var_dump('each1', each($array1));
var_dump('each2', each($array2));
var_dump('each3', each($array3));
var_dump('each4', each($array4)); // Warning
var_dump('array_values1', array_values($array1)[0]); // Notice
var_dump('array_values2', array_values($array2)[0]);
var_dump('array_values3', array_values($array3)[0]);
var_dump('array_values4', array_values($array4)[0]); // Warning
var_dump('array_slice1', array_slice($array1, 0, 1));
var_dump('array_slice2', array_slice($array2, 0, 1));
var_dump('array_slice3', array_slice($array3, 0, 1));
var_dump('array_slice4', array_slice($array4, 0, 1)); // Warning
list($elm) = $array1; // Notice
var_dump($elm);
list($elm) = $array2;
var_dump($elm);
list($elm) = $array3; // Notice
var_dump($elm);
list($elm) = $array4;
var_dump($elm);

Like you can see, we have several 'one line' solutions that work well in some cases, but not in all.

In my opinion, you have should that handler only with arrays.

Now talking about performance, assuming that we have always array, like this:

$elm = empty($array) ? null : ...($array);
...you would use without errors:
$array[count($array)-1];
array_shift
reset
array_values
array_slice

array_shift is faster than reset, that is more fast than [count()-1], and these three are faster than array_values and array_slice.