Facebook friend counter

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}