How to return first 5 objects of Array in Swift?

By far the neatest way to get the first N elements of a Swift array is using prefix(_ maxLength: Int):

let array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
let slice5 = array.prefix(5) // ArraySlice
let array5 = Array(slice5)   // [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

the one-liner is:

let first5 = Array(array.prefix(5))

This has the benefit of being bounds safe. If the count you pass to prefix is larger than the array count then it just returns the whole array.

NOTE: as pointed out in the comments, Array.prefix actually returns an ArraySlice, not an Array.

If you need to assign the result to an Array type or pass it to a method that's expecting an Array param, you will need to force the result into an Array type: let first5 = Array(array.prefix(5))

You can do it really easy without filter, map, reduce, or prefix by just returning a range of your array via a subscript:

var wholeArray = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
var n = 5

var firstFiveSlice = wholeArray[0..<n] // 1,2,3,4,5

let firstFiveArray = Array(firstFiveSlice)