通过SimpleXML返回XPath函数的结果

Question

It seems that PHP SimpleXML XPath doesn't allow to get results of XPath functions:

$s = new \SimpleXMLElement('<test><node>A</node><node>B</node></test>');
var_dump($s->xpath("count(node)"));

Returns an empty array:

array(0) {
}

While Using DOM returns the expected value 2:

$dom = new \DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML('<test><node>A</node><node>B</node></test>');
$xpath = new \DOMXPath($dom);
var_dump($xpath->evaluate("count(node)"));


float(2.0)

Is there a way to do the same directly with SimpleXML?

Answer 1

PHP's SimpleXML only works on queries which return nodesets. count(...) returns a scalar value which is not supported. Use DOMXPath which is much more capable or count the objects in the result array:

var_dump(count($s->xpath("node")));

int(2)