is there a way to display the name of all the attributes within a xml file's node? just the names not the values?
Assuming you're using SimpleXML you could use SimpleXMLElement::attributes() to get the attributes and simply run [man]array_keys[/man] to extract the attribute names.
If you're using DOM you could look at the DOMElement::$attributes property and iterate over it looking at the $name property of each item.