Why can't I access the exploded array element immediately?

Question

Why can't I immediately access elements in the array returned by explode()?

For example, this doesn't work:

$username = explode('.',$thread_user)[1]; 
//Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '[

But this code does:

$username = explode('.',$thread_user); 
$username = $username[1];

I don't usually program in PHP, so this is rather confusing to me.

Answer 1

The reason it isn't obvious how to do what you want is that explode could return false. You should check the return value before indexing into it.