PHP count items in a multi-dimensional array

Question

As you can see from the following array, there are three elements that appear on Nov 18, and another two elements that appear on Nov 22. Can someone tell me how I can retri

Answer 1

Does this work for what you need?

$dates = array(array(array("2011-11-18 00:00:00" => C), array("2011-11-18 00:00:00" => I),array
("2011-11-18 00:00:00" => S)),
array(array("2011-11-22 00:00:00" => C), array("2011-11-22 00:00:00" => S)));

$date_count = array();  // create an empty array

foreach($dates as $date) {  // go thought the first level
    foreach($date as $d) {  // go through the second level
        $key = array_keys($d);  // get our date
        // here we increment the value at this date
        // php will see it as 0 if it has not yet been initialized
        $date_count[$key[0]]++;
    }
}
    // show what we have
print_r($date_count);

Prints:

Array ( [2011-11-18 00:00:00] => 3 [2011-11-22 00:00:00] => 2 )

Note: this assumes that you will always be getting data as you structured your array and that each date will be formatted the same. If you can't assume each date will be formatted, this would be a simple conversion using the date() function. If you can't assume that you will get data structured exactly like this, the best way to tackle that would probably be through a recursive function.