PHP syntax for dereferencing function result
PHP can not access array results from a function. Some people call this an issue, some just accept this as how the language is designed. So PHP makes you create unessential variables just to extract the data you need.
So you need to do.
$var = foobar();
print($var[0]);
This is specifically array dereferencing, which is currently unsupported in php5.3 but should be possible in the next release, 5.4. Object dereferencing is on the other hand possible in current php releases. I'm also looking forward to this functionality!