This method is not part of the DOM standard. It was created as a simpler
approach for appending an XML DocumentFragment in a DOMDocument.
If you want to stick to the standards, you will have to create a temporary
DOMDocument with a dummy root and then loop through the child nodes of the
root of your XML data to append them.
Here is (maybe) a better example: /** * Helper function for replacing $node (DOMNode) * with an XML code (string) * * @var DOMNode $node * @var string $xml */ public function replaceNodeXML(&$node,$xml) { $f = $this->dom->createDocumentFragment(); $f->appendXML($xml); $node->parentNode->replaceChild($f,$node); }