How do I return an XML element?

I am using fopen to open an xml document.
Say there is an element: <USER AGE="15"/>
How do I echo that 15 in PHP?
Do I need an XML library? was hoping there was a straight PHP way, possibly regex

 

$xml = '[...] <USER AGE="15"/> [...]';

preg_match('/<user\s+age="([\d]+)"\/>/i', $xml, $match);

echo $match[1];

PHP:

Untested but should work.

 

ok so if i am using: $testingxml = fopen("xmldoc.xml", "r");
how to i integrate, sorry I am a n00b.... i just dont see how your script requires the fopen. but if not, then where is it getting the XML from?

 

I'd use file_get_contents() (Much easier to use)

$xml = file_get_contents('xmldoc.xml');

preg_match('/<user\s+age="([\d]+)"\/>/i', $xml, $match);

echo $match[1];

PHP:

 

Got that function from PHP Manual (User Contributed Notes). Very handy and useful. Convert a string containing XML into a nested array.

function xml2array ($xml_data)
{
   // parse the XML datastring
   $xml_parser = xml_parser_create ();
   xml_parse_into_struct ($xml_parser, $xml_data, $vals, $index);
   xml_parser_free ($xml_parser);

   // convert the parsed data into a PHP datatype
   $params = array();
   $ptrs[0] = & $params;  
   foreach ($vals as $xml_elem) {
       $level = $xml_elem['level'] - 1;
       switch ($xml_elem['type']) {
       case 'open':
           $tag_or_id = (array_key_exists ('attributes', $xml_elem)) ? $xml_elem['attributes']['ID'] : $xml_elem['tag'];
           $ptrs[$level][$tag_or_id] = array ();
           $ptrs[$level+1] = & $ptrs[$level][$tag_or_id];
           break;
       case 'complete':
           $ptrs[$level][$xml_elem['tag']] = (isset ($xml_elem['value'])) ? $xml_elem['value'] : '';
           break;
       }
   }
   
   return ($params);

} 

PHP: