One of the greatest new features in PHP 5.1 is the SimpleXML extension, an idea borrowed from a Perl module in CPAN. The approach is as simple as it is ingenious. The most intuitive way to access XML is probably via an object-oriented programming (OOP) approach: Subnodes are properties of their parent nodes/objects, and XML attributes turn into object attributes. This makes accessing XML very easy, including full iterator support, so foreach can be used. Parsing XML with SimpleXML (simplexml-read.php)<?php $xml = simplexml_load_file('quotes.xml'); echo '<ul>'; foreach ($xml->quote as $quote) { $year = htmlspecialchars($quote['year']); $phrase = htmlspecialchars($quote->phrase); $author = htmlspecialchars($quote->author); echo "<li>$author: \"$phrase\" ($year)</li>"; } echo '</ul>'; ?> This code loads a file using simplexml_load_file()you can also use simplexml_load_string() for stringsand then reads all information in. Compare this to the DOM approach. SimpleXML may be slower in some instances than DOM, but the coding is so much quicker.
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