Advanced PHP for Web Professionals

Creating an XML Parser

Before you can use PHP's XML extension to read XML files, you must create a parser. Since XML documents are extensible, there is no way for PHP to know what elements you are searching for in the XML. Therefore, you must tell PHP how it should parse the document. You tell PHP how to parse the document by defining a new XML parser instance and then defining element handlers and character handlers. An element handler is simply a function that runs when an element is encountered in the XML. You need to define two element handlers, one handler for when an element is encountered by PHP and another handler for when the PHP parser leaves the current element. Additionally, you must specify a handler for the character data that exists ...