Call Facebook API to echo like count doesn't work - php

Question

I'd like to display the number of likes for my Facebook page on my website. The previous method I used isn't working anymore since a couple of days.
When I call the Facebook graph API like this:
https://api.facebook.com/method/links.getStats?urls=http://www.facebook.com/549585444&format=json
It gives me the following output (fictional example):
[{"url":"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/549585444","normalized_url":"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/549585444","share_count":0,"like_count":122,"comment_count":0,"total_count":122,"click_count":0,"comments_fbid":null,"commentsbox_count":0}]
Now I like to echo the like count:
<?php
$fb_page = "549585444";
$url = "https://api.facebook.com/method/links.getStats?urls=http://www.facebook.com/".$fb_page."&format=json";
$curl = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
$json_returned = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
$json_returned = json_decode($json_returned, true);
echo $json_returned['like_count'];
?>
But the number doesn't appear. Any idea why?

Answer 1

As you can see in the JSON output, the answer is wrapped in an array:
array(1) {
[0]=>
array(9) {
["url"]=>
string(33) "http://www.facebook.com/549585444"
["normalized_url"]=>
string(33) "http://www.facebook.com/549585444"
["share_count"]=>
int(0)
["like_count"]=>
int(0)
["comment_count"]=>
int(0)
["total_count"]=>
int(0)
["click_count"]=>
int(0)
["comments_fbid"]=>
NULL
["commentsbox_count"]=>
int(0)
}
}
To get the number output, you'll have to get the first item in the array by changing this row:
echo $json_returned['like_count'];
To this:
echo $json_returned[0]['like_count'];