How to get the first element of a collection in Laravel?

To get the first element of a Laravel collection, you can use the first method. This method will return the first element of the collection, or null if the collection is empty.

Here’s an example:

$collection = collect([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]);
$first = $collection->first();

// $first is now 1

You can also pass a callback to the first method to get the first element that matches a certain condition:

$collection = collect([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]);
$first = $collection->first(function ($value, $key) {
    return $value > 3;
});

// $first is now 4

If you want to get the first element and remove it from the collection, you can use the shift method:

$collection = collect([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]);
$first = $collection->shift();

// $first is now 1
// $collection is now [2, 3, 4, 5]

Note that the first and shift methods return only the value of the element, not the key. If you want to get the key as well, you can use the first method in combination with the keys and values methods:

$collection = collect(['a' => 1, 'b' => 2, 'c' => 3]);
$first = $collection->first(function ($value, $key) {
    return $value > 1;
});

$key = $collection->keys()->first(function ($value, $key) use ($first) {
    return $collection[$key] == $first;
});

// $first is now 2
// $key is now 'b'