How to get element count in multiple xml files in a folder using PHP?

The following php script gives count of elements in a single xml file in the folder uploads. But I have number of xml files in the folder. What to modify in the following script so that I get result in tabular format with the file name and element count for all the xml files in the folder.

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$xml = simplexml_load_file("uploads/test.xml");
//file to SimpleXMLElement 
$xml = simplexml_import_dom($xml);
print("Number of elements: ".$xml->count());	
?>

First, create a function with the logic you have:

function getXML($path) {
    $doc = new DOMDocument;
    $xml = simplexml_load_file($path);
    //file to SimpleXMLElement 
    $xml = simplexml_import_dom($xml);
    return $xml;
}

Note that I:

• have converted the path into a parameter, so you can reuse the same logic for your files
• separated the parsing of XML from showing it
• returned the XML itself, so you can get the count or you can do whatever else you may want with it

This is how you can get the files of a given path:

$files = array_diff(scandir('uploads'), array('.', '..'));

we get all files except for . and .., which are surely not of interest here. Read more about scandir here: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.scandir.php

You received an array of filenames on success, so, let's loop it and perform the logic you need:

$xmls = [];
foreach ($files as $file) {
    if (str_ends_with($file, '.xml')) {
        $xmls[] = $file . "\t" . getXML('uploads/' . $file)->count();
    }
}
echo implode("\n", $xmls);

EDIT

As @Juan kindly explained in the comment section, one can use

$files = glob("./uploads/*.xml");

instead of scandir and that would ensure that we no longer need a call for array_diff and later we can avoid the if inside the loop:

$xmls = [];
foreach ($files as $file) {
    $xmls[] = $file . "\t" . getXML('uploads/' . $file)->count();
}
echo implode("\n", $xmls);

You're first loading the XML file into a SimpleXMLElement then import it into a DOMElement and call the method count() on it. This method does not exists on DOMElement - only on SimpleXMLElement. So the import would not be necessary.

You can use a GlobIterator to iterate the files:

$directory = __DIR__.'/uploads';

// get an iterator for the XML files
$files = new GlobIterator(
  $directory.'/*.xml', FilesystemIterator::CURRENT_AS_FILEINFO
);

$results = [];
foreach ($files as $file) {
  // load file using absolute file path 
  // the returned SimpleXMLElement wraps the document element node
  $documentElement = simplexml_load_file($file->getRealPath());
  $results[] = [
    // file name without path
    'file' => $file->getFilename(),
    // "SimpleXMLElement::count()" returns the number of children of an element
    'item-count' => $documentElement->count(),
  ];
}

var_dump($results);

With DOM you can use Xpath to fetch specific values from the XML.

$directory = __DIR__.'/uploads';

// get an iterator for the XML files
$files = new GlobIterator(
  $directory.'/*.xml', FilesystemIterator::CURRENT_AS_FILEINFO
);

// only one document instance is needed
$document = new DOMDocument();

$results = [];
foreach ($files as $file) {
  // load the file into the DOM document
  $document->load($file->getRealPath());
  // create an Xpath processor for the loaded document
  $xpath = new DOMXpath($document);
  $results[] = [
    'file' => $file->getFilename(),
    // use an Xpath expression to fetch the value
    'item-count' => $xpath->evaluate('count(/*/*)'),
  ];
}

var_dump($results);

The Xpath Expression

• Get the document element /*
• Get the child elements of the document element /*/*
• Count them count(/*/*)

* is an universal selector for any element node. If you can you should be more specific and use the actual element names (e.g. /list/item).