PHP, DOM and XML : Part 3 – saveXML

In the document object model (DOM) implementation in PHP, The DOMDocument class has two functions for saving xml files; save() and saveXML(). saveXML() is used to output the contents to a string and save() to output to a URI.

Serialize an xml:

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$output = $domdoc->saveXML();

The above line would serialize the DOMDocument object into

<main><sub>contents</sub></main>

The saveXML() takes an optional node parameter, which should also be a domdocument object. The resulting xml will be just an output of that parameter element.

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$output = $domdoc->saveXML($sub);

The output would be

<sub>contents</sub>

using save():

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$size = $domdoc->save('outputdata.xml);

The above code saves the document to the file outputdata.xml and returns the number of bytes written to the variable $size.
The newline characters, tabs, and spaces are removed in case of saveXML(). we can use formatOutput to save the xml with formatting.

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$domdoc->formatOutput = TRUE;
echo $domdoc->saveXML();

Tags: dom, xml parsing, xml whitespace