Dealing with XML errors

Dealing with XML errors when loading documents is a very simple task. Using the libxml functionality it is possible to suppress all XML errors when loading the document and then iterate over the errors.

The libXMLError object, returned by libxml_get_errors(), contains several properties including the message, line and column (position) of the error.

Example #1 Loading broken XML string

<?php
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$sxe = simplexml_load_string("<?xml version='1.0'><broken><xml></broken>");
if (!$sxe) {
    echo "Failed loading XML\n";
    foreach(libxml_get_errors() as $error) {
        echo "\t", $error->message;
    }
}
?>

The above example will output:

Failed loading XML
    Blank needed here
    parsing XML declaration: '?>' expected
    Opening and ending tag mismatch: xml line 1 and broken
    Premature end of data in tag broken line 1

See Also