Jeremy Johnstone has come up with a simple plist xml parser. The plist format is what iTunes (and some other application) uses for its library files.

Normally SimpleXML is enough to handle most XML parsing needs, but the plist XML format is just broken enough to make parsing it with SimpleXML virtually impossible. Since I hadn't played with XMLReader much, I thought it would be a good chance to give it a spin. For the anxious types, the code is available on github in my php_class_lib project, so dig right in.

His parser takes in the name of the file to fetch and a parser() method is called to do the actual work. The contents of the file are returned as an array (he includes a print_r() of that output too).

Christian Weiske has a quick tip on how to get larger XML files to pull into PHP5 and be usable:

At work I had the task to implement the synchronization between an online shop and a commodity management system. Data exchange format was XML - one big XML file for all of the products (some thousands with dozens of attributes). Big question: How do I import the file in a way that is most convenient for me as a programmer - and without exceeding the machine's RAM when loading a 1 GiB file?

The newer alternatives both use the same technology (DOM and SimpleXML - with DOM behind it) so he goes more "low tech" than that and opts for the XMLReader extension to pull in the large amounts of data. Available in PHP5, the XMLReader extension, which he combines with an Iterator from the SPL to makes for a simple, quick little parser.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted looking at PHP5 and the new XML tools that it has to offer - as broken up into categories:

• the DOM functionality (replacing DOM XML, ext/dom)
• SimpleXML
• XMLReader (replacing the ext/xml extension)
• XMLWriter
• XSL

Things are a bit different using XML in PHP 5. In a similar scenario, you could use one of the new native extensions, like DOM or SimpleXML, to manipulate the XML data tree. This tree can then be passed directly to and used by the XSL extension without incurring any additional overhead. There is no serialization nor copying involved; ext/xsl is able to work directly with the XML tree it is given, resulting in a significant improvement in use of system resources as compared to coding a similar task in PHP 4. So now that you have an idea why XML support got a face lift, you might like to know about the different tools available to you.