count child nodes in phpsimpledom

[ludo1960]

Hi guys,

I'm using PHP Simple DOM, thanks to the good folk her I'm making progress. The html i'm parsing has a bunch of links in a li ul structure. I've managed to get the top layer of links extracted and I would like to have a count of the number of child nodes in the layer below the main links. Here is my code:

$html = file_get_html('test/php/book.html');

if(!empty($html)){  
    
    $lis = $html->find('.chunklist', 0)->children() ;

    for ( $i = 0 ; $i < count($lis) ; $i++ ) {

        $parent_term = $lis[$i]->first_child()->innertext . ', ' ;
        $parent_node = $lis[$i]->children[0]->attr['href'] . '<br>' ; 
    
        //echo count($parent_node->children()) ; this gives error Warning: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable
        echo $parent_term . $parent_node ;

        $parent_node = $const . $parent_node ; 
        echo $parent_node ;
        
        $html2 = file_get_html($parent_node) ;
        $lis2 = $html2->find('.chunklist', 0)->children() ; 
    }
}

I don't see anything in the manual regarding counting nodes, any idea how to go about this?

[cyberRobot]

Are you looking to count what you get from the following line?

$lis2 = $html2->find('.chunklist', 0)->children() ;

If so, have you tried PHP's count() function?

count($lis2)

Note that I haven't used PHP Simple DOM. So I'm just guessing here. ?

[ludo1960]

Good guess!

Yeah I tried that, but some of the $lis2 don't have children, and I'm not sure how to deal with null results,

$lis2 = $html2->find('.chunklist', 0)->children() ;

results in:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function children() on null

I've tried:

        for ( $j = 0 ; $j < count($lis2) ; $j++ ) {
            if ($lis2 > 0) {  // and tried $lis2 <> 0
                $parent_term = $lis2[$j]->first_child()->innertext . ', ' ;
                $parent_node = $lis2[$j]->children[0]->attr['href'] . '<br>' ; 
               // echo count( $parent_node ) ;
            } else {

                echo "no data found" ;
            } 
        }

kinda stuck as to what to try next?

[maxxd]

According to the documentation, find() returns null if the requested object isn't found. So check for null before you attempt the children() call - right now you're checking if $lis2 is greater than 0.