Facebook friend counter - php

Question

What I'm trying to do is a counter of facebook friends in php, so the result of the code would be something like "You have 1342 Friends!".
So this is the code im using:
<?php
require_once("../src/facebook.php");
$config = array();
$config[‘appId’] = 'MY_APP_ID';
$config[‘secret’] = 'MY_APP_SECRET';
$facebook = new Facebook($config);
$user_id = "MY_USER_ID";
//Get current access_token
$token_response = file_get_contents
("https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?
client_id=$config[‘appId’]
&client_secret=$config[‘secret’]
&grant_type=client_credentials");
// known valid access token stored in $token_response
$access_token = $token_response;
$code = $_REQUEST["code"];
// If we get a code, it means that we have re-authed the user
//and can get a valid access_token.
if (isset($code)) {
$token_url="https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id="
. $app_id
. "&client_secret=" . $app_secret
. "&code=" . $code . "&display=popup";
$response = file_get_contents($token_url);
$params = null;
parse_str($response, $params);
$access_token = $params['access_token'];
}
// Query the graph - Friends Counter:
$data = file_get_contents
("https://graph.facebook.com/$user_id/friends?" . $access_token );
$friends_count = count($data['data']);
echo "Friends: $friends_count";
echo "<p>$data</p>"; //to test file_get_contents
?>
So, the result of the echo $Friends_count its always "1".
And then I test $data with an echo and it give me the list of all the friends so it is getting the content but its not counting it right... how could i fix it?
I've already tried changing the
$friends_count = count($data['data']);
for
$friends_count = count($data['name']);
and
$friends_count = count($data['id']);
but the result is always "1".
The result of the above code looks like this;
Friends: 1
{"data":[{"name":"Enny Pichardo","id":"65601304"},{"name":"Francisco Roa","id":"500350497"},etc...]

Answer 1

You have a JSON object; a string, not anything PHP can "count" with count(). You need to parse the JSON first:
$obj=json_decode($data);
$friends_count = count($obj->data); // This refers to the "data" key in the JSON
Some references I quickly googled:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php
http://roshanbh.com.np/2008/10/creating-parsing-json-data-php.html

Answer 2

You can get friend count by fql easily.
There is a friend_count field against the user table that you can query.
SELECT friend_count FROM user WHERE uid = me();
https://graph.facebook.com/fql?q=SELECT friend_count FROM user WHERE uid={any id}