Counting results displayed - php

Question

I would like to know how to count how many people follows someone in Instagram and place the number in a var, Instagram gives you this link:
https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/3/followed-by?access_token=xxxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
And displays a result like so
{
"data": [{
"username": "meeker",
"first_name": "Tom",
"profile_picture": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/profiles/profile_6623_75sq.jpg",
"id": "6623",
"last_name": "Meeker"
},
{
"username": "Mark",
"first_name": "Mark",
"profile_picture": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/profiles/profile_29648_75sq_1294520029.jpg",
"id": "29648",
"last_name": "Shin"
},
{
"username": "nancy",
"first_name": "Nancy",
"profile_picture": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/profiles/profile_13096_75sq_1286441317.jpg",
"id": "13096",
"last_name": "Smith"
}]
}
How can I count how many are there and place it in a var, lets say:
<? echo "You are been follow by ".$followers." users!"; ?>
To display: You are been follow by 3 users!

Answer 1

You would need to use json_decode to to decode the JSON response, then access the resulting object's data attribute (an array of 'follower' objects), and count that:
$json = '{
"data": [{
"username": "meeker",
"first_name": "Tom",
"profile_picture": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/profiles/profile_6623_75sq.jpg",
"id": "6623",
"last_name": "Meeker"
},
{
"username": "Mark",
"first_name": "Mark",
"profile_picture": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/profiles/profile_29648_75sq_1294520029.jpg",
"id": "29648",
"last_name": "Shin"
},
{
"username": "nancy",
"first_name": "Nancy",
"profile_picture": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/profiles/profile_13096_75sq_1286441317.jpg",
"id": "13096",
"last_name": "Smith"
}]
}';
$json = json_decode($json);
echo "You have " .count($json->data) ." followers"
OR
$json = json_decode($json,true);
echo "You have " .count($json['data']) ." followers"

Answer 2

You are getting as a json string, you need to decode it using json_decode.
$data = json_decode($string,true);
$followers = count($data['data']);
CodePad Demo.

Answer 3

You need to use json_decode() which will return you a PHP array. Then all you need to do is to count() all the values in the array with 'data' key.

Answer 4

You can use json_decode
$array = json_decode($str);
Then give
echo count($array);
It will give total count of users

Answer 5

simple way to count entries returned asJSON
echo count(json_decode($followers);

Answer 6

Use json_decode() to create a PHP array from the JSON. Then you can simply do a count() on that:
$jsonData = json_decode($yourAPIResult);
echo count($jsonData->data);
Be aware, however, that you probably should set up some error handling in case the API did not return a proper JSON string. So something like this might be better:
if (is_null($jsonData) || !property_exists($jsonData, 'data')) {
echo '?';
} else {
echo count($jsonData->data);
}