Wicked Cool PHP

#70: Transforming XML into a Usable Form

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is one of the most popular products of the markup language fad. It's designed to provide standard interchange formats for any kind of data. Though XML is bloated and tremendously inefficient, most web services now use XML in their output, and some services even require XML as input. Therefore, you likely will need to deal with it at some point.

The best way to get started with XML is to parse a piece of it—that is, verify that the data is valid XML and examine the data. You'd think that with all of the hype that accompanied the introduction of XML, someone would have come up with an easy way to work with it. Unfortunately, for many years, accessing XML data was ruthlessly ...