Recursive Array Item Count

Contributed by pradeep () On 1st February, 2007

This is an article on Recursive Array Item Count in PHP.

Sometimes we need to find the number of items, located inside an array.Let's take this array as example,

PHP Code:


			
$a[0]=1;

 $a[1][0]=3;

 $a[1][1]=4;

 $a[3]=5;

here the total item count is 4, but when you use count() function you get 3. So I wrote a small function which counts array elements, even recursively.

PHP Code:


			
function get_array_recursive_count(&$a)

 {

     $c = 0;

     foreach($a as $v)

     {

         if(is_array($v))

             $c += get_array_recursive_count($v);

         else

             $c++;

     }

 

     return $c;

 }

Example:

PHP Code:


			
$aa = array("a","b");

 $bb = array("3","4");

 $a = array($aa,$bb,"a");

 

 function get_array_recursive_count(&$a)

 {

     $c = 0;

     foreach($a as $v)

     {

         if(is_array($v))

             $c += get_array_recursive_count($v);

         else

             $c++;

     }

 

     return $c;

 }

 

 print get_array_recursive_count($a);

 print "<br/>";

 print count($a);