XML Node counting problem

I am having trouble getting a node count from an XML data list.


<menu>
<catagory>
<title>Catagory One for the money</title>
<sub1>This is sub1 one</sub1>
<sub2>This is sub2 one</sub2>
<sub3>This is sub3 one</sub3>
</catagory>
<catagory>
<title>Catagory Two for the show</title>
<sub1>This is sub1 two</sub1>
<sub2>This is sub2 two</sub2>
</catagory>
</menu>

menu=new ActiveXObject ("MSXML.DOMDocument");
menu.load("XML FileName.xml");
testNode=menu.documentElement.firstChild;

document.write(testNode.firstChild.nodeName);
this yeilds ---> title

document.write(testNode.firstChild.nextSibling.nodeName);
this yeilds ---> sub1

document.write(testNode.firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nodeName);
this yeilds ---> sub2

document.write(testNode.lastChild.nodeName);
this yeild ----> sub3
_________________________________________

What I need is a way to count these children while not knowing how many there are .... if any?

One way you should be able to do this is as follows:

foundNodes=menu.documentElement.getElementsByTagName("*");

This will return a list and you should be able to use "foundNodes.length" to get a count of the items.

If you want specific tags just substite the tag in place of the "*".

Hey....thanks for the ("*") wild card info. I have not seen used with the getElementsByTagName before. When I try this however, I get a list of all nodes in the data list......in my case...."23" . What I want is to count the children of a node. As to my example;
<catagory>
<title>......
<sub1>......
<sub2>......
</catogory>

How do I count the Children under the <catagory> node? In this example I would be looking for a count of three children.

thanks,
gary

Well.....I played around with the code and I found a variation that worked!!! Most of my problem has been not quite understanding the xml dom structure.....but i know more now than i did.....
Thanks again for the ("*") hint!!!
gary

This does what i want.....which is to count the children of a node.....note the first thread xml data list. I'm sure the code can be more consice....but hey it works!

var menu;
menu = new ActiveXObject("MSXML.DOMDocument");
menu.load("TestDataXml.xml");
var testNode;
testNode = menu.documentElement.firstChild;
var findNodes;
findNodes2 = testNode.getElementsByTagName("*");
findNodesCount2 = findNodes2.length;
document.write(findNodesCount2 + "<br>");
document.write(findNodes2.item(2).nodeName + "<br>")
document.write("<hr>");
var i;
for (i = 0; i < findNodesCount2; i++) {
document.write(findNodes2.item(i).nodeName + " - ");
document.write(findNodes2.item(i).firstChild.nodeValue + "<br>");
}