Question

i have a small problem with my script and i’m stuck… I need to count elements in my xml main tags, independently of their names. Can you tell me how to do this?

$.ajax({
    type:"GET",
    url:"../amica_programator/data/content_data.xml",
    dataType:"xml",
    success: function(xml) {
            var class_main_content = $('.main_content ul').attr('class');
            var xml_element_name = $(xml).find(class_main_content)[0].nodeName.toLowerCase();
            if ((class_main_content) == xml_element_name){
                var n_elements = $(xml).find(xml_element_name).find("element").size();
                alert(n_elements);
            }

Answer 1

If your XML data is not a XMLDocument first you should parse it with $.parseXML(). After that you can use simple selectors to find count of elements. Here is an example;

var xml = '<root><tag_01><element></element><element></element><element></element></tag_01><tag_02><element></element><element></element></tag_02></root>',
    xmlDoc = $.parseXML(xml)
    $xml = $(xmlDoc),
    tagName01 = 'tag01',
    tagName02 = 'tag02';
alert('total <element> count: ' + $xml.find('element').size());
alert('total <tag_01 > element> count: ' + $xml.find(tagName01 + ' > element').size());
alert('total <tag_02 > element> count: ' + $xml.find(tagName02 + ' > element').size());

ps: I have to add <root> to make XML valid.