DOMDocument::loadXML

szalma dot laszlo at zengo dot eu (2009-10-27 08:14:27)

Loading from a string works fine without the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> header, but in this case the xmlEncoding won't be set, and this makes the utf-8 characters (international, and special characters) to be encoded as hexa entities when saved with saveXML()!

remacg (2009-02-26 07:33:20)

Instead of doing this:

<?php
$str = <<<XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE root [
<!ENTITY nbsp "&#160;">
]>
<div>This&nbsp;is a non-breaking space.</div>
XML;

$dd2 = new DOMDocument();
$dd2->loadXML($str);

echo $dd2->saveXML();
?>

simply use:

loadHTML() rather than loadXML().

olalonde at NOSPAM dot gmail dot com (2008-03-21 17:00:32)

For some reason, when you set DOMDocument's property 'recover' to true, using '@' to mask errors thrown by loadXml() won't work.
Here's my workaround:
function maskErrors() {}
set_error_handler('maskErrors');
$dom->loadXml($xml);
restore_error_handler();
You could also simply do this: error_reporting(0); and then set back error_reporting to its original state.

Stuart Grimshaw (2007-06-26 13:57:27)

Possible values for the options parameter can be found here:
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.libxml.php#libxml.constants

Marc Liyanage (2007-06-18 07:08:43)

The documentation states that loadXML can be called statically, but this is misleading. This feature seems to be a special case hack and its use seems to be discouraged according to http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=41398.
Calling the method statically will fail with an error if the code runs with E_STRICT error reporting enabled.
The documentation should be changed to make it clear that a static call is against recommended practice and won't work with E_STRICT.

gabriel dot birke at web dot de (2007-05-03 08:44:57)

If you want to preserve greater-than and lower-than signs inside CDATA sections with XSL processing you have to use the LIBXML_NOCDATA option:

Given this XSL:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" >
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<script type="text/javascript">
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">
// Decorative Brackets: 
<![CDATA[// <<<<>>>> ]]>
</xsl:text>
</script>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

and this PHP:

<?php

$xml = new DOMDocument;
$xml->load('dummy.xml');

$xsl1 = new DOMDocument;
$xsl1->load('scripttest.xsl');

$xsl2 = new DOMDocument;
$xsl2->load('scripttest.xsl', LIBXML_NOCDATA);

$proc = new XSLTProcessor;

echo "Normal Load:\n";
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl1); 
echo $proc->transformToXML($xml);

echo "LIBXML_NOCDATA Load:\n";
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl2); 
echo $proc->transformToXML($xml);

?> 

You get the following output:
Normal Load:
<script type="text/javascript">
// Decorative Brackets: 
// &lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt; 
</script>
LIBXML_NOCDATA Load:
<script type="text/javascript">
// Decorative Brackets: 
// <<<<>>>> 
</script>

jazzslider at hotmail dot com (2007-04-30 13:14:11)

When using loadXML() to parse a string that contains entity references (e.g.,  ), be sure that those entity references are properly declared through the use of a DOCTYPE declaration; otherwise, loadXML() will not be able to interpret the string.

Example:
<?php
$str = <<<XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<div>This&nbsp;is a non-breaking space.</div>
XML;

$dd1 = new DOMDocument();
$dd1->loadXML($str);

echo $dd1->saveXML();
?>

Given the above code, PHP will issue a Warning about the entity 'nbsp' not being properly declared.  Also, the call to saveXML() will return nothing but a trimmed-down version of the original processing instruction...everything else is gone, and all because of the undeclared entity.

Instead, explicitly declare the entity first:
<?php
$str = <<<XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE root [
<!ENTITY nbsp "&#160;">
]>
<div>This&nbsp;is a non-breaking space.</div>
XML;

$dd2 = new DOMDocument();
$dd2->loadXML($str);

echo $dd2->saveXML();
?>

Since the 'nbsp' entity is defined in the DOCTYPE, PHP no longer issues that Warning; the string is now well-formed, and loadXML() understands it perfectly.

You can also use references to external DTDs in the same way (e.g., <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">), which is particularly important if you need to do this for many different documents with many different possible entities.

Also, as a sidenote...entity references created by createEntityReference() do not need this kind of explicit declaration.

shaoyu73 at gmail dot com (2007-03-15 20:53:58)

earth at anonymous dot com,
preserveWhiteSpace property needs to be set to false for formatOutput to work properly, for some reason.
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$dom->loadXML($xmlStr);
...
$element->appendChild(...);
...
$dom->formatOutput = true;
$xmlStr = $dom->saveXML();
echo $xmlStr;
This would format the output nicely.

Gavin Sinai gsinai at gmx dot net (2006-08-30 07:34:39)

loadXml reports an error instead of throwing an exception when the xml is not well formed. This is annoying if you are trying to to loadXml() in a try...catch statement. Apparently its a feature, not a bug, because this conforms to a spefication. 

If you want to catch an exception instead of generating a report, you could do something like

<?php
function HandleXmlError($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline)
{
    if ($errno==E_WARNING && (substr_count($errstr,"DOMDocument::loadXML()")>0))
    {
        throw new DOMException($errstr);
    }
    else 
        return false;
}

function XmlLoader($strXml)
{
    set_error_handler('HandleXmlError');
    $dom = new DOMDocument();
    $dom->loadXml($strXml);    
    restore_error_handler();
    return $dom;
 }

?>

Returning false in function HandleXmlError() causes a fallback to the default error handler.

mp at webfactory dot de (2006-08-08 08:26:54)

While loadXML() expects its input to have a leading XML processing instruction to deduce the encoding used, there's no such concept in (non-XML) HTML documents. Thus, the libxml library underlying the DOM functions peeks at the <META> tags to figure out the encoding used.
See http://xmlsoft.org/encoding.html.

earth at anonymous dot com (2006-04-12 02:28:44)

Note that loadXML crops off beginning and trailing whitespace and linebreaks.
When using loadXML and appendChild to add a chunk of XML to an existing document, you may want to force a linebreak between the end of the XML chunk and the next line (usually a close tag) in the output file:
$childDocument = new DOMDocument;
$childDocument>preserveWhiteSpace = true;
$childDocument->loadXML(..XML-Chunk..);
$mNewNode = $mainDOcument->importNode($childDocument->documentElement, true);
$ParentNode->appendChild($mNewNode);
$ParentNode->appendChild($mainDocument->createTextNode("\\n ");
Although it is said that DOM should not be used to make 'pretty' XML output, it is something I struggled with to get something that was readable for testing. Another solution is to use the createDocumentFragment()->appendXML(..XML-Chunk..) instead, which seems not to trim off linebreaks like DOMDocument->loadXML() does.

primaryspace at hotmail dot com (2005-08-09 13:42:58)

This method replaces any existing document tree already in the object with the document tree contained in the source argument.