PHP 5 Power Programming

8.3. Parsing XML

Two techniques are used for parsing XML documents in PHP: SAX (Simple API for XML) and DOM (Document Object Model). By using SAX, the parser goes through your document and fires events for every start and stop tag or other element found in your XML document. You decide how to deal with the generated events. By using DOM, the whole XML file is parsed into a tree that you can walk through using functions from PHP. PHP 5 provides another way of parsing XML: the SimpleXML extension. But first, we explore the two mainstream methods.

8.3.1. SAX

We now leave the somewhat boring theory behind and start with an example. Here, we're parsing the example XHTML file we saw earlier. We do that by using the XML functions available in PHP ( ...