How to display XML data in web page using PHP ?

Last Updated : 31 Mar, 2021

In this article, we are going to display data present in an XML file on a web page using PHP through the XAMPP server. PHP is a server-side scripting language that is mainly for processing web data. The XML stands for an extensible markup language.

Requirements:

XAMPP server

Syntax:

<root>
   <child>
   <subchild>.....</subchild>
   </child>
</root>

Approach: We are going to use mainly two functions in our PHP code. The simplexml_load_file() function is used to convert an XML document to an object.

simplexml_load_file
```
simplexml_load_file(name of XML file)
```
children(): The children() function finds the children of a specified node.
```
$xml_data->children()
```

Steps to execute:

Step 1: Start XAMPP server.

Open notepad and type the following codes in xml_data.xml and code.php formats The xml_data.xml: Consider student XML data as an example.

xml_data.xml

<?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "utf-8"?>
<collegedata>
   <department category = "IT">
      <subjects lang = "en">java</subjects>
      <name>G.Sravan Kumar</name>
      <age>22</age>
      <marks>98</marks>
      <address>guntur</address>
   </department>
   
   <department category = "CSE">
      <subjects lang = "en">Python</subjects>
      <name>B. Naga sudheer</name>
      <age>28</age>
      <marks>96</marks>
       <address>guntur</address>
   </department>
   
   <department category = "IT">
      <subjects lang = "en">sql</subjects>
      <name>Radha</name>
      <age>25</age>
      <marks>78</marks>
       <address>guntur</address>
   </department>
     
</collegedata>

Step 3:The following is the code for code.php file.

code.php

<?php
// Start php code
// Load xml file into xml_data variable
$xml_data = simplexml_load_file("xml_data.xml") or 
die("Error: Object Creation failure");
// Use foreach loop to display data and for sub elements access,
// We will use children() function
foreach ($xml_data->children() as $data)
{
    //display each sub element in xml file
    echo "Subject name : ", $data->subjects . "<br> ";
    echo "Student name : ", $data->name . "<br> ";
    echo "Student age : ", $data->age . "<br> ";
    echo "Student marks : ", $data->marks . "<br>";
    echo "Student address : ", $data->address . "<br>";
    echo "------------------------------------";
    echo "<br>";
}
?>