XML and PHP

DOM or SAX?

Now that you’ve seen (and hopefully understood) the two most common approaches to parsing XML with PHP, you’re probably wondering: Which one do I use?

It’s a good question, and one that doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all answer. Both DOM and SAX approaches have advantages and disadvantages, and your choice of technique must depend on the type of data being parsed, the requirements of your application, and the constraints under which you are operating.

The SAX approach is linear: It processes XML structures as it finds them, generating events and leaving the event handlers to decide what to do with each structure. The advantage of this approach is that it is resource-friendly; because SAX does not build a tree representation of the ...