Ah, Leigh may be on to it: If the XML is blank or even if just the 'country' element is empty, than 0 is still 0, but 0 can't be determined, since 'cities' wouldn't even exist in the arrayLen(stcXml.country.cities.xmlChildren) test is 'country' is empty. That would be why your new first test (<cfif StructKeyExists(stcXML.country, "cities")> ) is the key ...
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