SimpleXML: How to find number of children of top-level element?

Question

Hi!

How do I find the number of children of the root element in an XML document using PHP and SimpleXML?

DLiKS

Answer 1

If you are using PHP 5.3+ you can use SimpleXMLElement::count

Otherwise, just do somthing like:

$sxe = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
$kids = $sxe->children();
echo count($kids);

Answer 2

Try:

$xml = simplexml_load_string( $string );
echo count( $xml );

or

echo $xml->count();

Answer 3

SimpleXML represent XML nodes as arrays, so, you can simple use count() with simplexml object as argument count(simplexml_load_string( $string ))