Question

So, I want to ultimately create a DOM object for the XML, however, $xml_dom seems to be empty. var_dump shows object(DOMElement)#3 (0) { }. $xml_simple is good. What am I doing wrong here?

$get_url_report = 'http://...'; // contains well-formatted XML data
$xml_simple = simplexml_load_string(file_get_contents($get_url_report));
$xml_dom = dom_import_simplexml($xml_simple);

Answer 1

DOM doesn’t work well with var_dump(), for example read this comment. Additional there is already a bug report (for over two years now …).

The object is probably not empty, even if it looks so. You should be able to use it like described in the manual.