Parsing XHTML with PHP SimpleXML

Again, XHTML is really powerful when served as application/xhtml+xml. We can even parse it with the PHP SimpleXML library. For example, given the following markup:

<body>
  <p>Test</p>
</body>

we can write the following PHP code:

$xhtml_file = 'test.xhtml';
$xhtml_doc = simplexml_load_file($xhtml_file);

$p = $xhtml_doc->body->p;
echo $p; // 'Test'

Very simple, isn't it? The fact is that XHTML is treated exactly as XML when served with its proper content type.

Leave a Reply

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.