So I want to get some field values that I need as input, sometimes for rendering. According to this page:
http://www.computerminds.co.uk/articles/rendering-drupal-7-fields-right-way
It is a mistake to hard-code 'und' for internationalization, so to avoid this the author says that we should use field_view_field().
I personally, don't need all info related to the field, just the value. So I opt for field_get_items() and then field_view_value() as outlined in the blog post. But this seems a lot of work just to get a single value of a field (plus we have to find and load the node). Do we really have to do so many steps to get a simple field value? I would have thought that this would be a very common function that users need.
I'm wondering that, barring any simple method, I could just grab the value directly from field_get_items()[0]['value']. Maybe the drawbacks are that it doesn't pass through any sanitation routines? You can see more info here (trying to grab 'axis1t'):
Just looking for possible alternatives because my code is becoming somewhat bloated to keep getting field values this way along with the fact that they are burried inside field_collections.