gmail unread email count using curl - php

Question

I created a script that can get the unread email list as a feed from the gmail here is my code
<?php
//function to get unread emails taking username and password as parameters
function check_email($username, $password)
{
//url to connect to
$url = "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom";
// sendRequest
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ":" . $password);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "");
$curlData = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
//returning retrieved feed
return $curlData;
}
//making page to behave like xml document to show feeds
header('Content-Type:text/xml; charset=UTF-8');
//calling function
$feed = check_email("username", "password");
echo $feed;
?>
the output getting like this
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed version="0.3" xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">
<title>Gmail - Inbox for suneth2#gmail.com</title>
<tagline>New messages in your Gmail Inbox</tagline>
<fullcount>1282</fullcount>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://mail.google.com/mail" type="text/html" />
<modified>2012-08-01T12:33:48Z</modified>
<entry>
<title>eBCS Pro 1 August 2012</title>
<summary>bcs logo eBCS Pro 1 August 2012 Video interview Olympic IT The Met Police's director of IT, Steve</summary>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://mail.google.com/mail?account_id=test#gmail.com&message_id=138e21a3404cc7b2&view=conv&extsrc=atom" type="text/html" />
<modified>2012-08-01T12:12:44Z</modified>
<issued>2012-08-01T12:12:44Z</issued>
<id>tag:gmail.google.com,2004:1409100718455703474</id>
<author>
<name>eBCS Newsletter</name>
<email>e-bulletin#lists.bcs.org.uk</email>
</author>
</entry>
<entry>
so want to read the
<fullcount>1282</fullcount>
tag
when you pass the username and password to this function it can show the email list,
I need to get only the message count, is there any way to catch or count the items

Answer 1

this is the answer, i read the xml tag using php
$xmlobjc = new SimpleXMLElement($feed);
echo $xmlobjc->fullcount[0];
and replace the header with
header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8');

Answer 2

This works too:
curl -u $(cat username):$(cat password) --silent 'https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom' | sed -n 's:.*<fullcount>\(.*\)</fullcount>.*:\1:p'