PHP XML library

In this post, you'll learn how to parse XML into an array in PHP. SimpleXML is a PHP extension that makes this possible.

Table of Contents Show

The SimpleXML PHP Extension
How to Convert XML to an Array With PHP
Read and Parse the XML File
Convert the <?xml version='1.0'?> 60 Object Into Its JSON Representation
Decode the JSON String Into an Array
The Best PHP Scripts on CodeCanyon
Learn PHP With a Free Online Course
What is the XML in PHP?
How to get XML file in PHP?
What are XML libraries?
What are the XML parsers available in PHP?

In your day-to-day PHP development, sometimes you'll need to deal with XML content. Whether it’s exporting data as XML documents or processing incoming XML documents in your application, it’s always handy to have a library that can perform these operations smoothly. When it comes to dealing with XML in PHP, there are different methods to choose from. In fact, there are different extensions available in PHP that allow you to read and parse XML documents.

PHP’s XML parser is based on James Clark’s expat library, which is a stream-oriented XML library written in C. This XML parser library allows you to parse XML documents, but it’s not able to validate them. It’s event-based and stream-oriented, and thus it’s really useful when you’re dealing with very large XML files—but a little more complicated than it needs to be for small files.

The other option is the SimpleXML extension, which is one of the most popular extensions used by the PHP community to process XML documents. The SimpleXML extension allows you to parse XML documents very easily, just as if you were reading a file in PHP.

In this article, we’re going to use the SimpleXML extension to demonstrate how you could convert XML content into an array. If you want to follow along with the example in this article, make sure that you’ve installed the SimpleXML extension in your PHP installation.

The SimpleXML PHP Extension

The SimpleXML PHP extension provides a complete toolset which you can use to read, write and parse XML documents in your PHP applications. It’s important to note that the SimpleXML extension requires PHP 5 at a minimum. Also, it requires the libxml PHP extension.

The SimpleXML extension is enabled by default, but if you want to check if it's enabled in your PHP installation, you can check it quickly by using the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

53 function.

As you can see, you should see the SimpleXML section in the output of the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

53 function.

The SimpleXML extension provides different functions that you could use to read and parse XML content.

Loading an XML String or File With SimpleXML

For example, if you want to parse the XML file, you can use the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

55 function. The

<?xml version='1.0'?>

55 function allows you to read and parse the XML file in a single call. On the other hand, if you have an XML string which you want to convert into an XML document object, you can use the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

57 function.

You could also use the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

58 function to read the file contents and pass the resulting string to the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

57 function, which eventually parses it into an object. Alternatively, if you prefer the object-oriented way, you could also use the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

60 class and its utility methods to convert an XML string into an object.

In this article, we’re going to use the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

55 function to read an XML file, and we’ll see how to convert it into an array. Next, we’ll go through a real-world example to demonstrate how to do this.

How to Convert XML to an Array With PHP

In this section, we’ll see how you can convert XML content into an array.

First of all, let’s quickly go through the steps that you need to follow to convert XML content into an array with the help of the SimpleXML extension.

Read the file contents and parse them. At the end of this step, the content is parsed and converted into the
```
<?xml version='1.0'?>   
```
60 object format. We’re going to use the
```
<?xml version='1.0'?>   
```
55 function to achieve this.
Next, you need to convert the
```
<?xml version='1.0'?>   
```
60 object into a JSON representation by using the
```
<?xml version='1.0'?>   
```
65 function.
Finally, you need to use the
```
<?xml version='1.0'?>   
```
66 function to decode the JSON content so that it eventually generates an array of all documents.

For demonstration purposes, let’s assume that we have an XML file as shown in the following snippet. We’ll call it employees.xml. It contains the basic details of all employees. Our aim is to convert it into an array that you could use for further processing.

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<employees>

    <employee id="1">

        <name>John</name>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<employees>

<employees>

<employees>

<employees>

<employees>

<employees>

<employees>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<employees>

As you can see, the employees.xml file contains the names and emails of employees. It’s important to note that the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

67 value is passed as an attribute of the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

68 tag.

Next, create the simplexml.php file with the following contents.

<?xml version='1.0'?>

    <employee id="1">

<?xml version='1.0'?>

    <employee id="1">

<?xml version='1.0'?>

    <employee id="1">

<?xml version='1.0'?>

    <employee id="1">

<?xml version='1.0'?>

    <employee id="1">

<employees>

<employees>

        <name>John</name>

<employees>

        <name>John</name>

<employees>

        <name>John</name>

Let’s go through the important snippets in the above example to understand how it works.

Read and Parse the XML File

Firstly, we’ve used the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

69 function to disable standard libxml errors and enable user error handling. In this way, we can catch the XML errors during parsing and display them in a user-friendly way. This is also really useful in the development phase.

Next, we’ve used the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

55 function to read and parse the employees.xml file. The first argument of the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

55 function is a path to the XML file. It’s important to note that you need to adjust this path as needed. In the above example, it’s assumed that the employees.xml file is at the same directory level as that of the simplexml.php file. If the XML file is parsed successfully, it returns an object of the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

60 class; otherwise, it returns

<?xml version='1.0'?>

73.

Next, if the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

74 variable is set to

<?xml version='1.0'?>

73, there was a problem parsing the employees.xml file. In that case, we use the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

76 function to get all the errors and display them for debugging purposes. The

<?xml version='1.0'?>

74 variable is set to

<?xml version='1.0'?>

78 if the employees.xml file is parsed successfully.

Convert the <?xml version='1.0'?> 60 Object Into Its JSON Representation

Next, we’ve used the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

65 function to convert the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

60 object into its JSON representation. We’ve stored the JSON string in the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

82 variable, as shown in the following snippet.

Decode the JSON String Into an Array

Finally, we’ve used the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

66 function to decode the JSON string data. It’s important to note that we’ve passed

<?xml version='1.0'?>

78 in the second argument of the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

66 function, which converts all objects into associative arrays.

Had you not passed

<?xml version='1.0'?>

78 in the second argument, the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

87 function would have produced objects of type

<?xml version='1.0'?>

88 instead of arrays.

So that's an outline of the whole process. Let’s run the simplexml.php file, and you should see the following output.

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<employees>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<employees>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<employees>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<employees>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<employees>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

        <email>[email protected]</email>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<?xml version='1.0'?>

As expected, the array contains all the documents. As you may have noticed, it has also parsed the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

89 field, which is attached with each document in the form of an attribute, and you can access it with the

<?xml version='1.0'?>

90 key, as shown in the above output. Basically, everything is available in the form of key-value pairs. So you have a complete array at your disposal for further processing.

So that’s how you can convert XML content into an array in PHP. It was a very simple example, but it should give you some insight into the whole process.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed how to convert an XML file into an array using PHP and SimpleXML. The SimpleXML extension is really useful when it comes to parsing and manipulating XML documents.

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What is the XML in PHP?

PHP XML Parser Introduction XML is a data format for standardized structured document exchange. More information on XML can be found in our XML Tutorial. This extension uses the Expat XML parser. Expat is an event-based parser, it views an XML document as a series of events.

How to get XML file in PHP?

Use simplexml_load_file function to load external XML file in your PHP program and create an object. After that, you can access any element from the XML by this object as follows. $xmldata = simplexml_load_file("employees.

What are XML libraries?

As the name implies, XML is a library for verifying contents of XML files. In practice, it is a pretty thin wrapper on top of Python's ElementTree XML API.