Finding number of strongly connected components

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I need to find the number of strongly connected components of a digraph, and I looked at the documentation for the ~DiGraph.strongly_connected_components() method. Tabbing .strongly_connected_components? gives the documentation from sage/graphs/base/static_sparse_graph.pyx for tarjan_strongly_connected_components(G) that says,

This routine returns a pair ``[nscc, scc]``, where ``nscc`` is the number of
SCCs and ``scc`` is a dictionary associating to each vertex ``v`` an
integer between ``0`` and ``nscc-1``, corresponding to the SCC containing
``v``. SCCs
are numbered in reverse topological order, that is, if ``(v,w)`` is an edge
in the graph, ``scc[v] <= scc[w]``

Which would be great, as I just need the result of tarjan_strongly_connected_components_C. However, 1) this is only called during tarjan_strongly_connected_components, which does the (admittedly minor) additional work of topologically sorting SCCs and 2) the examples (and testing) show the output of ~DiGraph.strongly_connected_components() is a list of vertex lists for each connected component. This is perfectly reasonable and clear, but more than I want, particularly as there's some work in the back end that determines what I'm looking for earlier in the process.

1) Should I just use len(~DiGraph.strongly_connected_components())? 2) Am I badly misreading the documentation for this method?

I'm in Sage 7.2.

Thanks in advance for help here!