xml_parse_into_struct - PHP code example

PHP Function Xml_Parse_Into_String

The php function xml_parse_into_struct is used to parse an XML document into an array structure. This is useful when you need to structure a large amount of XML data into something that can be easily manipulated.

XML is an Extensible Markup Language which is used to store and transport data from one system to another. It uses opening and closing tags to structure data. It also allows you to define your own tags. XML is supported by PHP and many other languages like JavaScript, Python, C# etc. PHP's DOM class provides a way to access XML documents but sometimes it's necessary to read and parse XML in raw form.

An example of a simple XML parse in PHP is shown below. The function xml_parse_into_struct takes the XML string as input and parses it into 2 parallel array structures. The first array holds a list of all the elements encountered by the parser while the second contains the index values for those elements. These parameters are passed by reference.

XML documents can be large and if you want to use this function to parse an entire XML document in a reasonable amount of time it's best to break the XML into chunks and pass them to this function. For example, if you have a large XML document with a lot of text nodes you can pass the XML to this function in several chunks and then call xml_parse_into_struct() with each new chunk of data. This will help to prevent the XML from becoming unwieldy and slow to process.

xml_parse_into_struct example

$this->error_string = 'SimplePie bug! Please report this!';
                return false;
            }
        }

        $return = true;

        static $xml_is_sane = null;
        if ($xml_is_sane === null)
        {
            $parser_check = xml_parser_create();
            xml_parse_into_struct($parser_check, '<foo>&</foo>', $values);
            xml_parser_free($parser_check);
            $xml_is_sane = isset($values[0]['value']);
        }

        // Create the parser         if ($xml_is_sane)
        {
            $xml = xml_parser_create_ns($this->encoding, $this->separator);
            xml_parser_set_option($xml, XML_OPTION_SKIP_WHITE, 1);
            xml_parser_set_option($xml, XML_OPTION_CASE_FOLDING, 0);
            xml_set_object($xml, $this);

            $this->error = 'XML or PCRE extensions not loaded!';
            return false;
        }
        // Then check the xml extension is sane (i.e., libxml 2.7.x issue on PHP < 5.2.9 and libxml 2.7.0 to 2.7.2 on any version) if we don't have xmlreader.         elseif (!extension_loaded('xmlreader'))
        {
            static $xml_is_sane = null;
            if ($xml_is_sane === null)
            {
                $parser_check = xml_parser_create();
                xml_parse_into_struct($parser_check, '<foo>&</foo>', $values);
                xml_parser_free($parser_check);
                $xml_is_sane = isset($values[0]['value']);
            }
            if (!$xml_is_sane)
            {
                return false;
            }
        }

        // The default sanitize class gets set in the constructor, check if it has         // changed.