XMLWriter

the PHP5 XMLWriter class allows to easily create XML well-formed documents.

The most useful methods:

• openURI($output) // use 'php://output' as argument to stream directly
• startDocument('1.0') // add the initial tag. 1st argument : xml version
• writeElement('hr') // write the empty node [hr/]
• writeAttribute('src','img.gif') //write the attribute (inside the last node) and value
  e.g: [img src="http://www.blogger.com/img.gif" /]
• writeElement('b','content') // write node with content "[b]content[/b]"
• startElement('body') //add the start node [body]
• endElement() //close the last element started. e.g: [/body]
• How to create nodes with attributes and text:
  startElement('textarea')
  writeAttribute('name','area1')
  text('default text')
  endElement()
  output:
  [textarea name="area"]default text[/textarea]
• endDocument()
• flush()
• there are other methods to write comments, DTD, CData etc... view the official documentation.

Note: I used square brackets instead of "minor or greater than" because of blogspot editor limitation.

Complete Example: RSS Feed !!

@date_default_timezone_set("GMT");
$xml = new XMLWriter();
// Output directly to the user
$xml->openURI('php://output');
$xml->startDocument('1.0');
$xml->setIndent(2);
//rss
$xml->startElement('rss');
$xml->writeAttribute('version', '2.0');
$xml->writeAttribute('xmlns:atom', 'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom');

//channel
$xml->startElement("channel");

//title, desc, link, date
$xml->writeElement('title', 'PHP news');
$xml->writeElement('description', 'description....');
$xml->writeElement('link', 'http://www.example.com/rss.hml');
$xml->writeElement('pubDate', date("D, d M Y H:i:s e"));

//item !
$xml->startElement("item");
$xml->writeElement('title', 'news 1');
$xml->writeElement('link', 'http://www.example.com/1.html');
$xml->writeElement('description', 'descr 1');
$xml->writeElement('pubDate', date("D, d M Y H:i:s e"));
//cat
$xml->startElement('category');
$xml->writeAttribute('domain', 'http://www.example.com/cat1.htm');
$xml->text('News');
$xml->endElement();
//end item
$xml->endElement();
//end channel
$xml->endElement();
// end rss
$xml->endElement();
//end doc
$xml->endDocument();
//flush
$xml->flush();

output: