Question

I’m a somewhat experienced PHP scripter, however I just dove into parsing XML and all that good stuff.

I just can’t seem to wrap my head around why one would use a separate XML parser instead of just using the explode function, which seems to be just as simple. Here’s what I’ve been doing (assuming there is a valid XML file at the path xml.php):

$contents = file_get_contents("xml.php");
$array1 = explode("<a_tag>", $contents);
$array2 = explode("</a_tag>", $array1[1]);
$data = $array2[0];

So my question is, what is the practical use for an XML parser if you can just separate the values into arrays and extract the data from that point?

Thanks in advance! 🙂

Answer 1

In a nutshell, its consistency. Before XML came into wide use there were numerous undocumented formats for keeping information in files. One of the motivators behind XML was to create a well defined, standard document format. With this well defined format in place, a general set of parsing tools could be developed that would work consistently on documents so long as the documents adhered to the aforementioned well defined format.

In some specific cases, your example code will work. However, if the document changes

...
<!-- adding an attribute -->
<a_tag foo="bar">Contents of the Tag</a_tag>
...

...
<!-- adding a comment to the contents -->
<a_tag>Contents <!-- foobar --> of the Tag</a_tag>
...

Your parsing code will probably break. Code written using a correctly defined XML parser will not.