Re: [PHP] XML functions

Ahmad F AlTwaijiry wrote:
> Dears
> 
> When i checked the php manual i found many Solutions to read/write xml 
> files and im confused now :)
> 
> Which function/library is better and is there any new article that 
> compare each function/library?

I use DOMDocument.
It works best if the input file you are reading is UTF-8.

It has some issues I haven't yet figured out related to namespaces, 
sometimes when loading perfectly valid XML that uses namespaces for 
import into another document, I lose the namespace and get "default" 
prepended to the node name. I do not understand why it feels it needs to 
do this, but it apparently does in some cases.

For those cases, I currently use hackish workarounds where I remove the 
namespace with a preg_replace before import into the DOM and then add 
the namespace again using the DOM tools after it has been imported.

Where I have run into this problem is MathML and SVG within XHTML when I 
cache the MathML/SVG as a string in APC for import into documents.

It is not so much an issue with SVG in XHTML as SVG probably is best 
done as an object rather than directly embedded (but when generating SVG 
via DOMDocument I have a similar problem if I am using xlink namespace) 
but it is a problem with MathML which is usually done inline.

It could just be that I'm doing things wrong, but the documentation 
isn't exactly full of working example code.

So anyway, if you use namespaces, you may run into a few frustrating 
kinks, but DOMDocument is what I use, and it is very convenient because 
it is very similar to the JavaScript DOM2 methods (I believe intentionally).