Question

I have the following code:

$b = $br->b;
var_dump($b);
$iCountBlock = count($b);

Where b is a SimpleXMLElement object. The var dump outputs:

object(SimpleXMLElement)[16]
public 'blockID' => string '160999' (length=6)
public 'blockDesc' => string 'Description' (length=37)
public 'moduleID' => string '1' (length=1)
public 'pubID' => 
  object(SimpleXMLElement)[18]
public 'contentID' => string '93305' (length=5)
public 'linkToPageID' => 
  object(SimpleXMLElement)[19]
public 'moduleFunction' => string 'replaceHTML' (length=11)
public 'moduleVars' => 
  object(SimpleXMLElement)[20]
public 'c' => 
  object(SimpleXMLElement)[21]
    public 'contentID' => string '93305' (length=5)
    public 'contentType' => string '1' (length=1)
    public 'description' => string 'new.usdish.com index redesign content' (length=37)
    public 'content' => 
      object(SimpleXMLElement)[22]

However, $iCountBlock gets set to 1… it doesn’t appear to be counting all the public properties of the object as it should. I also tried using a foreach loop to loop over each property of b and it didn’t even enter the loop.

foreach($b as $key => $val) { ... }

I’m kinda at a loss here, as I’m not sure what’s going on. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Form PHP 5.3 and higher SimpleXMLElement does use a count function for the length!

$count = $b->count();

In PHP before 5.3 you have to use the childern property for getting the count.

$count = count($b->children()); 

Info at: http://php.net/manual/en/simplexmlelement.count.php