Best way to process large XML in PHP [duplicate]

Question

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 1

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.

Answer 2

My take on it:

https://github.com/prewk/XmlStreamer

A simple class that will extract all children to the XML root element while streaming the file. Tested on 108 MB XML file from pubmed.com.

class SimpleXmlStreamer extends XmlStreamer {     public function processNode($xmlString, $elementName, $nodeIndex) {         $xml = simplexml_load_string($xmlString);          // Do something with your SimpleXML object          return true;     } }  $streamer = new SimpleXmlStreamer("myLargeXmlFile.xml"); $streamer->parse();