Building XML Trees With PHP - A Hero Is Born (
Page 2 of 11 )
The XMLTree
class comes courtesy of PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (
http://pear.php.net). In case you didn't know, PEAR is an online repository of free PHP software,
including classes and modules for everything from data archiving to XML parsing.
When you install PHP, a whole bunch of PEAR modules get installed as well; the
XMLTree class is one of them.
In case your PHP distribution didn't include XMLTree, you can get yourself a
copy from the official PEAR Web site, at
http://pear.php.net - simply unzip the distribution archive into your PEAR directory and you're
ready to roll!
Let's begin with something simple - dynamically constructing an XML document
using XMLTree methods. Here's the code:
<?php
// include class
include("XML/Tree.php");
// instantiate object
$tree
= new XML_Tree();
// add the root element
$root =& $tree->addRoot("superhero");
//
add child elements
$name =& $root->addChild("name", "Peter Parker aka Spiderman");
$age =&
$root->addChild("age", 21);
// print tree
$tree->dump();
?>
Don't worry if it didn't make too much sense - all will be explained shortly.
For the moment, just feast your eyes on the output:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<superhero>
<name>Peter Parker aka Spiderman</name>
<age>21</age>
</superhero>
As you can see, the output of the script is a correctly-formatted, well-formed
XML document - all created using PHP code!
