PHP : Count number of JSON items/objects

Recently I need to paginate the search result returned by ElasticSearch. To paginate the result with standard CodeIgniter paginate helper.... one of the requirements is to know in advance the total_rows or the total number of rows to display.

Since ElasticSearch is not really a SQL database and my knowledge of ElasticSearch is at minimum just to get it running. I decided to use PHP's count function to get the total_rows ... by counting the items/objects inside JSON array.

To achieve this, first we need to encapsulate the result returned from ElasticSearch into JSON format with json_encode

 $json_data = json_encode($this->elasticsearch->advancedquery("type", $searchquery));

next, decode it back

 $decoded = json_decode($json_data);

and get the total_rows for configuring the pagination with

 $config['total_rows'] = count($decoded->hits->hits);

NOTE : To find the number of returned result or hits or other result variables that you want to capture....you can do this to see all the result output.

 echo "<pre>"; 
 print_r($json_data);
 echo "</pre>"; 

Hope this tutorial can help you to count the number of items or objects inside JSON array.