best xml parser code ?

VisionsOfCody

I've searching my way through the forum trying to find some code with a regex to parse through an xml file and turn it into an array because I'm not good enough to write one myself !!

I've also looked at the php manual user notes http://fr2.php.net/XML and there are several examples that people have written

my question is this : is there one that is considered as working better than the others ?

(preferably one that doesn't need a library installed on the server as the hosting company may not have installed it)

thanks for any enlightenment

MarkR

Provided your XML documents are of a reasonable size (think, < 1 megabyte, likely to fit into memory), using DOM is usually easiest.

So either use the DOM object, or SimpleXML, which is similar to DOM except it has a simpler PHP object structure rather than requiring W3C DOM methods.

Don't use regular expressions to parse XML
- They can't
- You won't be handling documents in different encodings correctly
- You will find that they match badly-formed documents, XML comments etc, where they should not.

Mark

VisionsOfCody

Ok so I had a look at the Dom and the SimpleXML things - SimpleXML looks like just what i need (if the hosting company has it installed) - otherwise i'll go for DOM

I hear you about not using regular expressions (and very glad too)

thanks