XML and PHP

Alternatives to PHP’s Native Functions:What You Should Know

Before getting into the details of different PHP-XML implementations, I’d like to take a few minutes to answer a very basic question, one which may already have occurred to you: Why, really, do you need to know about alternatives to PHP’s built-in XML functions?

The short answer? Most of the time, you don’t. As demonstrated in previous chapters of this book, PHP comes with a remarkably full-featured library of functions designed to streamline the process of creating, parsing, and processing XML documents. These functions address most of the tasks XML developers have to grapple with—everything from parsing and formatting XML documents to using XML to represent and pass data between systems—in ...