Question

I am dummy to PHP and XML, so please be patient if my question seems dumb.

I want to know how to index the XML elements so that I can access them. I am planning to put them into an array. However, I don’t know how to get the number of elements returned.

Here are the codes:

exer.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<actionstars>
 <name>Jean Claude Van Damme</name>
 <name>Scott Adkins</name>
 <name>Michael Jai White</name>
 <name>Dolph Lundgren</name>
 <name>Tom Cruise</name>
 <name>Michael Worth</name>
</actionstars>

index.php

<?php
 $dom = new DomDocument();
 $dom->load("exer.xml");
 $names = $dom->getElementsByTagName("name");
 echo count($names);
 foreach($names as $name) {
     print $name->textContent . "<br />";
 }
?>

When I do the echo count($names); it returns 1, which is obviously not the number of elements. Please help.

Answer 1

Have a look at the return value of getElementsByTagName, which will be a DOMNodeList.

Also for your problem you could do something like:

$names = array();
foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName("name") as $nameNode) {
  $names[] = $nameNode->nodeValue;
}

You don’t have to actually check the return value of getElementsByTagName, for it will allways be a DOMNodeList. This way you can use it directly in the foreach-loop whithout assigning unneeded variables.

What you have to check, is the size of $names, after the loop.