Question

I have many xml file’s, I do not want to get the value, but check if they have a child child nod or no. so I use count instead of foreach. but my code always echo no if there have no $xml->book->date in the first $xml->book roop.

$xml = simplexml_load_file('some.xml');
if (@count($xml->book->date)>0){
    echo 'yes';
}else{
    echo 'no';
}

the xml tree like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Catalog>
    <book>
     <title/><description/><price/>
  </book>
  <book>
     <title/><description/><price/>
     <date/>  //(optional, there may be 0 to n [book] elements having a [date] element in the document)
  </book>
  <book>
     <title/><description/><price/>
  </book>
  <book>
     <title/><description/><price/>
     <date/>
  </book>
</Catalog>

For this document the result of the working version of “count($xml->book->date)” should be 2, i.e. > 0

EDIT: maybe do not use count, but how to check if have or not have date childnod in the whole xml file? Thanks.

Answer 1

If you want to check in the entire xml document, then I think you’ll have to loop through all the book elements-

$found = false;
foreach($xml->book as $book)
{
    if(count($book->date)>0)
    {
        $found = true;
        break;
    }
}