Best way to process large XML in PHP

php xml parsing simplexml large-files
Petruza picture Petruza · Jul 22, 2009 · Viewed 50.1k times · Source

I have to parse large XML files in php, one of them is 6.5 MB and they could be even bigger. The SimpleXML extension as I've read, loads the entire file into an object, which may not be very efficient. In your experience, what would be the best way?

Answer

Eric Petroelje picture Eric Petroelje · Jul 22, 2009

For a large file, you'll want to use a SAX parser rather than a DOM parser.

With a DOM parser it will read in the whole file and load it into an object tree in memory. With a SAX parser, it will read the file sequentially and call your user-defined callback functions to handle the data (start tags, end tags, CDATA, etc.)

With a SAX parser you'll need to maintain state yourself (e.g. what tag you are currently in) which makes it a bit more complicated, but for a large file it will be much more efficient memory wise.

Related questions

How to use XMLReader in PHP?

I have the following XML file, the file is rather large and i haven't been able to get simplexml to open and read the file so i'm trying XMLReader with no success in php <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?&…

Read More
getting xml from URL into variable

I am trying to get an xml feed from a url http://api.eve-central.com/api/marketstat?typeid=1230&regionlimit=10000002 but seem to be failing miserably. I have tried new SimpleXMLElement, file_get_contents and http_get Yet none of …

Read More
How do you parse and process HTML/XML in PHP?

How can one parse HTML/XML and extract information from it?

Read More