PHP count null or 'new' elements within array - php

Question

My array is below. What I am trying to do is count the number of nodes in the array have null or 'new' for read_status.
Is there something more sufficient than looping through the array?
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[id] => 428
[read_status] =>
)
[1] => Array
(
[id] => 427
[read_status] =>
)
[2] => Array
(
[id] => 441
[read_status] => new
)
[3] => Array
(
[id] => 341
[read_status] => read
)
)
So the count should be 3.

Answer 1

you could do
$count = count(array_filter($myArray, function($item){
return $item['read_status'] != 'new';
}));
echo $count;
but I think its more efficient to just loop through it like this:
$count = 0;
foreach($myArray as $item){
if($item['read_status'] != 'new')$count++;
}
echo $count;

Answer 2

There is nothing wrong with looping in the array to do this, it might actually be faster than using a generic method to do it for you. It's simply this :
$count = 0;
foreach ($arrays as $entry)
{
if (!$entry['read_status'] || $entry['read_status'] === "new")
{
$count++;
}
}
echo $count;

Answer 3

I actually improved my SQL by removing the null completely -- so now read_status is either read or new.
IF(feed_read.read_status IS NULL,'new','read') AS read_status
From there, I was able to utilize another SO question in order to count the 'new' elements.
$counted = array_count_values(array_map(function($value){return $value['read_status'];}, $result));
echo $counted['new'];