I see that in the XML returned for any post, there is a node called "link" with an attribute rel="replies" and an attribute title="0 Comments". Is there any way to get this value "0 Comments" using the php api? I would like to know the number of comments for each post without having to request them.

Alternatively, I tried requesting all the comments for a particular post, which worked fine. However, when I put what I thought was an array of comments into the count() function, it always returned 1, and not the actual number of comments. After doing more searching, I don't think the query returns an array of comments, but I'm not sure what it does return.

In short, is there any way to find the number of comments associated with a post using the Zend package? Thanks.