Get the comment count of a post from the front end HTML/feed

As part of a plugin I’m starting to write, I need to collect the comment count of a post from an external 3rd party WordPress blog.

If you append /feed/ to a blog posts URL you get the comments feed, but it doesn’t include a total comment count, so it looks like my only way is to scrape it from the HTML.

Can anyone think of a better way? Something that is designed to be machine readable.

Thanks a lot in advance! ??