Parsing XML Documents in PHP
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XML Tutorials : Parsing XML Documents in PHP

All XML parsing is done by SimpleXML internally using the DOM parsing model.
There are no special calls or tricks you need to perform to parse a document. The
only restraint is that the XML document must be well-formed, or SimpleXML will
emit warnings and fail to parse it. Also, while the W3C has published a recommended
specification for XML1.1, SimpleXML supports only version 1.0 documents.
Again, SimpleXMLwill emit a warning and fail to parse the document if it encounters
an XML document with a version of 1.1.
All objects created by SimpleXML are instances of the SimpleXMLElement class.
Thus, when parsing a document or XML string, you will need to create a new
SimpleXMLElement; there are several ways to do this. The first two ways involve the
use of procedural code, or functions, that return SimpleXMLElement objects. One
such function, simplexml_load_string(), loads an XML document from a string,
while the other, simplexml_load_file(), loads an XML document from a path. The
following example illustrates the use of each, pairing file_get_contents() with
simplexml_load_string(); however, in a real-world scenario, it would make much
more sense to simply use simple_xml_load_file():



// Load an XML string

$xmlstr = file_get_contents(’library.xml’);

$library = simplexml_load_string($xmlstr);

// Load an XML file

$library = simplexml_load_file(’library.xml’);

Since it was designed to work in an object-oriented environment, SimpleXML also
supports an OOP-centric approach to loading a document. In the following example,
the first method loads an XML string into a SimpleXMLElement, while the second
loads an external document, which can be a local file path or a valid URL.



// Load an XML string

$xmlstr = file_get_contents(’library.xml’);

$library = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);

// Load an XML file

$library = new SimpleXMLElement(’library.xml’, NULL, true);

Note here that the second method also passes two additional arguments to
SimpleXMLElement’s constructor. The second argument optionally allows the ability
to specify additional libxml parameters that influence the way the library parses the
XML. It is not necessary to set any of these parameters at this point, so we left it to
NULL. The third parameter is important, though, because it informs the constructor
that the first argument represents the path to a file, rather than a string that contains
the XML data itself.		 Parsing XML Documents in PHP tutorial
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Detailed Information
     Tutorial: Parsing XML Documents in PHP
     Date Listed: 2009-10-29
     Submitted By: pelatutor
     Total Hits: 287
     Rating Tutorial Rating 1.50Tutorial Rating 1.50Tutorial Rating 1.50Tutorial Rating 1.50Tutorial Rating 1.50 (4 votes)

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