Abhishek Reddy — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 14:08:49 +0000

<?php
$children = $root->childNodes;
?>

The above returns a DOMNodeList object, not an array. Hence change the subsequent call to count() to:

<?php
echo(\"There are \" . $children->length . \" child elements. <br />\");
?>

Note that this counts recursively, so you will get a result of 5 rather than 2. This is because DOM functions respect whitespace, and in between each element you have newlines and possibly indentation. To solve this, you have to tell DOMDocument not to preserve whitespace when it loads birds5.xml, like so:

<?php
$XMLDoc = new DOMDocument;
$XMLDoc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$XMLDoc->load('birds5.xml');
?>