There are many ways we can work with XML in PHP, and they’re all useful in different
situations. There are three main approaches to choose from and they all have their
advantages and disadvantages:
1. SimpleXMLis the most approachable, and my personal favorite. It is easy to use
and understand, is well documented, and provides a simple interface (as the name
suggests) for getting the job done. SimpleXML does have some limitations, but it
is recommended for most applications.
2. DOM is handy when a project encounters some of the limitations in SimpleXML.
It’s more powerful and therefore more complicated to use, but there are a small
number of operations that can’t be done with SimpleXML. There are built-in func‐
tions to allow conversion between these two formats, so it’s very common to use a
combination of both in applications.
XMLReader, XMLWriter, and their sister XMLParserare lower-level ways of dealing
with XML. In general, these tools are complicated and unintuitive but they have a
major advantage: they don’t load the entire XML document into memory at once.