Sometimes we need to find the number of items, located inside an array.Let's take this array as example, PHP: $a[0]=1; $a[1][0]=3; $a[1][1]=4; $a[3]=5; here the total item count is 4, but when you use count() function you get 3. So I wrote a small function which counts array elements, even recursively. PHP: function get_array_recursive_count(&$a) { $c = 0; foreach($a as $v) { if(is_array($v)) $c += get_array_recursive_count($v); else $c++; } return $c; } Example: PHP: $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); Output: Code: 5 3