How to obtain follower count in Twitter API 1.1?

I'm trying to get the followers count from X user on Twitter using the API Version 1.1

The code I'm using works fine. What I need is a function to get the specific data I need from the data Twitter is giving me. In this case I need ['followers_count'].

This is PHP the code:

<?php
$token = '*';
$token_secret = '*';
$consumer_key = '*';
$consumer_secret = '*';

$host = 'api.twitter.com';
$method = 'GET';
$path = '/1.1/users/lookup.json'; // api call path


$query = array( // query parameters
    'screen_name' => 'ArianaGrande',
    'count' => '5'
);

$oauth = array(
    'oauth_consumer_key' => $consumer_key,
    'oauth_token' => $token,
    'oauth_nonce' => (string)mt_rand(), // a stronger nonce is recommended
    'oauth_timestamp' => time(),
    'oauth_signature_method' => 'HMAC-SHA1',
    'oauth_version' => '1.0'
);

$oauth = array_map("rawurlencode", $oauth); // must be encoded before sorting
$query = array_map("rawurlencode", $query);

$arr = array_merge($oauth, $query); // combine the values THEN sort

asort($arr); // secondary sort (value)
ksort($arr); // primary sort (key)

// http_build_query automatically encodes, but our parameters
// are already encoded, and must be by this point, so we undo
// the encoding step
$querystring = urldecode(http_build_query($arr, '', '&'));

$url = "https://$host$path";

// mash everything together for the text to hash
$base_string = $method."&".rawurlencode($url)."&".rawurlencode($querystring);

// same with the key
$key = rawurlencode($consumer_secret)."&".rawurlencode($token_secret);

// generate the hash
$signature = rawurlencode(base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', $base_string, $key, true)));

// this time we're using a normal GET query, and we're only encoding the query params
// (without the oauth params)
$url .= "?".http_build_query($query);
$url=str_replace("&amp;","&",$url); //Patch by @Frewuill

$oauth['oauth_signature'] = $signature; // don't want to abandon all that work!
ksort($oauth); // probably not necessary, but twitter's demo does it

// also not necessary, but twitter's demo does this too
function add_quotes($str) { return '"'.$str.'"'; }
$oauth = array_map("add_quotes", $oauth);

// this is the full value of the Authorization line
$auth = "OAuth " . urldecode(http_build_query($oauth, '', ', '));

// if you're doing post, you need to skip the GET building above
// and instead supply query parameters to CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS
$options = array( CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array("Authorization: $auth"),
                  //CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $postfields,
                  CURLOPT_HEADER => false,
                  CURLOPT_URL => $url,
                  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
                  CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false);

// do our business
$feed = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($feed, $options);
$json = curl_exec($feed);
curl_close($feed);

$twitter_data = json_decode($json, true);

echo "<pre>" . print_r($twitter_data, true) . "</pre>";    

?>

This is what I get from Twitter:

I should have shown you how to format the print_r(), so the output is (much!) more readable. Here is how to do it.

echo "<pre>" . print_r($twitter_data, true) . "</pre>";

Anyway, from your output, it looks like you can just do this:

$followers_count = $twitter_data[0]->followers_count;

It is important to understand how this can be worked out from this debugging. Firstly the output of the print_r indicates the returned object is an array, and the first entry is a zero index, which looks like it is listing search results (it basically is).

The 0th item is an object (it is a stdClass) and is not an array, so the thing to be retrieved needs to be looked up with the reference -> operator rather than an array index. My guess is all items of data per search result can be looked up as a property value of this object.

As an aside, you'll notice that some items within this object are also objects. You can look those up using another reference, e.g.:

$twitter_data[0]->entities->url;

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