CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpxmldomdocument
Arjun Bajaj
Arjun Bajaj

Reputation: 1962

How to Detect if an XML Element is Empty using DOMDocument in PHP?

If I delete an element inside an element, and if its the last element, then the parent element gets shortened to an empty element.

Example:

Start: <element><child1>Inner HTML</child1><child2>Inner HTML</child2></element>

I delete Child2 and I get: <element><child1>Inner HTML</child1></element>

I delete Child1 and I get: <element/>

Now I want that to not happen or at least a way to detect if the element is empty so I can replace it. How can I do that using DOMDocument in PHP.

Thanks...

Upvotes: 3

Views: 5634

Answers (2)

Gary
Gary

Reputation: 13912

Borrowing from the PHP manual:

count($elem->children());

So, to check if empty:

$isEmpty = count($elem->children()) === 0 ? true : false;

Upvotes: 3

Gumbo
Gumbo

Reputation: 655129

You should be able to determine whether an element is empty by inspecting the length of the list of child nodes:

$isEmpty = $elem->childNodes->length === 0;

Note that not only elements can be child nodes of another element but also CDATA sections, comments, and plain text.

Upvotes: 5

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