Replacing Parsing function with XMLReader in Specific PHP Code

Question

I\'m trying to utilize a PHP script to parse a large XML file (around 450 MB) to MYSQL database into certain structure and definitions to included XML elements. The problem is t

Answer 1

It is possible to expand a XML reader position to a DOMElement. This element is not associated with an DOMDocument, so it can not be converted into a SimpleXMLElement directly, but it can be imported into a DOMDocument.

$xml = <<<'XML'
<templates>
  <template>
     <styles>
        <style>TEST</style>
     </styles>
  </template>
</templates>
XML;

$reader = new XMLReader;
$reader->open('data://text/xml;base64,'.base64_encode($xml));

$dom = new DOMDocument;

// look for the first template element
while ($reader->read() && $reader->localName !== 'template') {
  continue;
}

// while you have an template element
while ($reader->localName === 'template') {
  // convert to SimpleXMLElement
  $element = simplexml_import_dom(
    // expand to a DOMElement in the prepared document object
    $reader->expand($dom)
  );
  var_dump(
    $element 
  );
  // move to the next template sibling
  $reader->next('template');
}

Output:

object(SimpleXMLElement)#3 (1) {
  ["styles"]=>
  object(SimpleXMLElement)#4 (1) {
    ["style"]=>
    string(4) "TEST"
  }
}

I usually use DOM+Xpath and do not convert it to SimpleXML, but this approach should work fine for your problem.