problem working with an array of objects

[badlyDrawnToy]

Hi there. I'm an Java developer who has taken up PHP5 - drawn to it by its OO support. But I'm having difficulty achieving similar syntax when dealing with an array of objects.

In PHP, the following works on two lines, but not on one, thus requiring two variables to be instantiated.

$ranges = $this->collection->getRanges();
$this->range = $ranges[0];

I don't need to assign to the variable $ranges, bt I can't seem to use the syntax:

$this->range = ($this->collection->getRanges())[0];

I thought perhaps I might need to cast the array, but this doesn't hepl i.e.

$this->range = ((Ranges)$this->collection->getRanges())[0];

any ideas?