I thought, hey I wonder how long it'd take in php.. so I was working on it and I actually couldn't remember all those funny extra parameters in simplexml_* so if you are googling and cannot find something that says exactly what you want well here it is.

His example includes two additional parameters in his simplexml_load_string call to handle the CDATA section correctly and make accessing the data inside the block just like getting at anything else in the object.

Note that Rob Richards has also commented on the post that this issue was corrected a while back and it shouldn't be needed anymore, but could effect older versions of the SimpleXML functionality.