Actually there are four relatively simple ways to read an XML file:
<font style="background-color: #eeeeee" color="#0077cc" face="Consolas">DOM</font>which uses the DOM API (and therefore has to load the whole document into memory)<font style="background-color: #eeeeee" color="#0077cc" face="Consolas">SimpleXML</font>which provides a very simple and elegant way to parse XML documents (but lacks a lot of document manipulation methods), it also loads the whole document into memory<font style="background-color: #eeeeee" color="#4a6b82" face="Consolas">XMLReader</font>is a stream-based XML pull parser. It’s usage is not as intuitive as the usage of both other options above, but it can be a life-saver when you have to parse large documents (as it does not need to load the whole document into memory and operates on the XML stream). The nice thing is that it allows you to inter-operate with the<font style="background-color: #eeeeee" face="Consolas">DOM</font>via<font style="background-color: #eeeeee" color="#0077cc" face="Consolas">XMLReader::expand()</font>.<font style="background-color: #eeeeee" color="#0077cc" face="Consolas">XML Parser</font>is a very low-level component which allows you to create SAX parsers, which means that you define handler functions which will be called when reading the XML file; essentially they have the same benefits as the<font style="background-color: #eeeeee" face="Consolas">XMLReader</font>(operating on streams)
My personal favorites are:
<font style="background-color: #eeeeee" face="Consolas">SimpleXML</font>when parsing relatively small XML files without the need to modifiy them<font style="background-color: #eeeeee" face="Consolas">XMLReader</font>when parsing large XML files
