XML Format in PHP

XML is a format for storing data. This format is often used for data exchange between sites, or between a server and a browser. Technically, XML is similar to HTML, but with any tags and attributes.

Let's create a separate file test.xml, where we will store a test XML document.

First, this document needs a special header that will indicate that we have XML and set the version of this language:

test.xml<?xml version="1.0"?>

Now we need to create a root element. It will be a tag that contains the entire document. The name of this tag can be anything. Let's call it <root>:

test.xml<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  
</root>

Now let's add some data:

test.xml<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <test>text</test>
</root>

Now in PHP we can load this element using the function simplexml_load_file:

index.php<?php
  $xml = simplexml_load_file('test.xml');
?>

A special object will be written to the variable, with which we can retrieve tag data from the XML tree:

index.php<?php
  var_dump($xml); // object
?>

Furthermore, in the following lessons, for brevity, I will omit the moment of obtaining XML and will assume that the variable $xml stores the result of the function simplexml_load_file.