PHP Array Returning [object Object]. Tried existing answers results with no luck

Question

I have tried multiple solutions that I have found around and none seem to be working. Can anyone give me any help? I want the result to return the ID's ($user) and currently it returns [object Object] with the code below. $users gives me all the sites user ID's and $pageview gets the number of times the page has been visited. If I change the return statement to $test I get all the values from $pageview correclty as they should be. The need for adding the key 'count' as $pageview is so that I can sort the array by the value of pageview in order to order the values based on the most popular page. I know this isn't the most efficient way to do this and using a proper analytics system would be better but for this task I need a method like this.

            if($args == 'Popular'){
                $users = get_all_user_ids('');
                foreach($users as $user) {
                    $pageview = get_user_meta($user, 'page_visits', true);
                    $test[] = $pageview;

                    if ($pageview != 0) {
                        $popularid[$pageview]['count'] = $user;
                    } else {
                        continue;
                    }
                    rsort($popularid);
                }
                return $popularid;
            }

The output is being encoded with json_encode after it has gone through this if statement and is then output onto the page in a JS function using document.getElementById("cm-output").innerHtml.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Let's try the below code,

$users = get_all_user_ids('');
$i=0; // initialization 
foreach($users as $user) {
    $pageview = get_user_meta($user, 'page_visits', true);
    if ($pageview != 0) {
        //$popularid[$pageview]['count'] = $user; // Err:  // Array won't be unique due to pageview might be same for multiple users
        // $popularid[$user] = $pageview; // Array will be unique based on user id
         $popularid[$i]['user'] = $user;
         $popularid[$i]['pageview'] = $pageview;
         $i++; // incrementor
    }
}
//rsort($popularid); // Sorts based on value
usort($popularid, function($a, $b) {
   return $a['pageview'] - $b['pageview'];
});
$userArr = array_column($popularid, 'user');
//return $popularid;
return $userArr;

Update: Core PHP code example for usort

$array[] = array('pageview'=>4,'user'=>'abc');
$array[] = array('pageview'=>2,'user'=>'xyz');
$array[] = array('pageview'=>1,'user'=>'pqrs');
$array[] = array('pageview'=>3,'user'=>'ijk');

usort($array, function($a, $b) {
    return $a['pageview'] - $b['pageview'];
});

$userArr = array_column($array, 'user'); // to get only the values from user key
print_r($userArr);