How to access the nth item in a Laravel collection?

Question

I guess I am breaking all the rules by deliberately making a duplicate question...

The other question has an accepted answer. It obviously solved the askers problem, but it did not answer the title question.

Let's start from the beginning - the first() method is implemented approximately like this:

foreach ($collection as $item)
    return $item;

It is obviously more robust than taking $collection[0] or using other suggested methods.

There might be no item with index 0 or index 15 even if there are 20 items in the collection. To illustrate the problem, let's take this collection out of the docs:

$collection = collect([
    ['product_id' => 'prod-100', 'name' => 'desk'],
    ['product_id' => 'prod-200', 'name' => 'chair'],
]);

$keyed = $collection->keyBy('product_id');

Now, do we have any reliable (and preferably concise) way to access nth item of $keyed?

My own suggestion would be to do:

$nth = $keyed->take($n)->last();

But this will give the wrong item ($keyed->last()) whenever $n > $keyed->count(). How can we get the nth item if it exists and null if it doesn't just like first() behaves?

Edit

To clarify, let's consider this collection:

$col = collect([
    2 => 'a',
    5 => 'b',
    6 => 'c',
    7 => 'd']);

First item is $col->first(). How to get the second?

$col->nth(3) should return 'c' (or 'c' if 0-based, but that would be inconsistent with first()). $col[3] wouldn't work, it would just return an error.

$col->nth(7) should return null because there is no seventh item, there are only four of them. $col[7] wouldn't work, it would just return 'd'.

You could rephrase the question as "How to get nth item in the foreach order?" if it's more clear for some.

Answer 1

I guess faster and more memory-efficient way is to use slice() method:

$collection->slice($n, 1);