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>"; 
} 
?> 