PHP DOM - counting child nodes?

Question

HTML snippet #1

    
headline

HTML snippe

Answer 1

Just count non-text nodes in your loop:

$count = 0;
foreach($div->childNodes as $node)    
  if(!($node instanceof \DomText))      
    $count++;

print $count;

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Using xpath:

$nodesFromDiv1 = $xpath->query("//div[1]/*")->length;
$nodesFromDiv2 = $xpath->query("//div[2]/*")->length;

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To remove empty text nodes, when preserveWhiteSpace=false is not working (as I suggested in the chat):

$textNodes = $xpath->query('//text()');

foreach($textNodes as $node)
  if(trim($node->wholeText) === '')
    $node->parentNode->removeChild($node);