PHP 7.0.6 Released

    DOMDocument::loadXML

    (PHP 5, PHP 7)

    DOMDocument::loadXML — Load XML from a string

    Description

    public mixed DOMDocument::loadXML ( string $source [, int $options = 0 ] )

    Loads an XML document from a string.

    Parameters

    source

    The string containing the XML.

    options

    Bitwise OR of the libxml option constants.

    Return Values

    Returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure. If called statically, returns a DOMDocument or FALSE on failure.

    Errors/Exceptions

    If an empty string is passed as the source, a warning will be generated. This warning is not generated by libxml and cannot be handled using libxml's error handling functions.

    This method may be called statically, but will issue an E_STRICT error.

    Examples

    Example #1 Creating a Document

    <?php
    $doc     = new DOMDocument();
    $doc->loadXML('<root><node/></root>');
    echo     $doc->saveXML();
    ?>

    Example #2 Static invocation of loadXML

    <?php
    // Issues an E_STRICT error
    $doc = DOMDocument::loadXML('<root><node/></root>');
    echo     $doc->saveXML();
    ?>

    See Also

    User Contributed Notes

    Gustavo L. Fabro
    2 years ago
    Always remember that with the default parameters this function doesn't handle well large files, i.e. if a text node is longer than 10Mb it can raise an exception stating:

    DOMDocument::loadXML(): internal error Extra content at the end of the document in Entity

    even though the XML is fine.

    The cause is a definition in parserInternals.h of lixml:
    #define XML_MAX_TEXT_LENGTH 10000000

    To allow the function to process larger files, pass the LIBXML_PARSEHUGE as an option and it will work just fine:

    $domDocument->loadXML($xml, LIBXML_PARSEHUGE);
    shaoyu73 at gmail dot com
    9 years ago
    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.
    olalonde at NOSPAM dot gmail dot com
    8 years ago
    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.
    Gavin Sinai gsinai at gmx dot net
    9 years ago
    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.
    jazzslider at hotmail dot com
    9 years ago
    When using loadXML() to parse a string that contains entity references (e.g., &nbsp;), 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.
    Stuart Grimshaw
    8 years ago
    Possible values for the options parameter can be found here:

    http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.libxml.php#libxml.constants
    Marc Liyanage
    8 years ago
    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.
    mp at webfactory dot de
    9 years ago
    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.
    remacg
    7 years ago
    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().
    earth at anonymous dot com
    10 years ago
    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.
    szalma dot laszlo at zengo dot eu
    6 years ago
    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()!
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