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;

---

Using xpath:

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

---

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);

Answer 2

Whitespace is considered a node because it is a text() node (DOMText).

You can make this work by changing your foreach loop:

foreach ($divs as $div) {
    echo $div->childNodes->length - $xpath->query('./text()', $div)->length, '<br>';
}

Answer 3

Firefox,Chrome and most other browsers, will treat empty white-spaces or new lines as text nodes, Internet Explorer will not.Check Here