How is a field's key (rather than value) obtained?

Question

In Drupal 7, I have a page content type that has a field called group (so the machine name is field_group). The field is a List (integer) field type.

This field might have allowed values as follows:

0|Description 1
1|Description 2
2|Description 3

If I want to see the value of this field for the current page, the following code correctly works:

echo render(field_view_field('node', $node, 'field_group'));

If the key were set to 1 for this page, the above code would display the value "Description 2."

However, is there a way to instead get the key (e.g., 0, 1, 2, etc.)?

Answer 1

You can change the display in your content type "Manage Display" and ask to have the key and not the label :) It's here : /admin/structure/types/manage/[your type]/display

Programmatically for a nude value as asked :

$items = field_get_items('node', $node, 'field_list'); 
$key = $items[0]['value'];