Use php to download an xml file

Improve this answer. Do you mean, you want that xml file to be downloaded instead of displaying? Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Podcast what if you could invest in your favorite developer? Who owns this outage? Building intelligent escalation chains for modern SRE.

Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Reducing the weight of our footer. If you want to run the test yourself, just click the button down here to download the PHP file.

For small documents the speed difference may be negligible, but if your application is going to handle large documents this difference can become very huge. For critical applications like web services or storing procedures it could be a good idea to try to use XMLWriter , while DOM should only be used for generating small documents at a slow rate.

In the graph below you can see more clearly the speed gain. Take home message: use XMLWriter for large documents, fast-rate services and critical applications.

I really thank you for reading this post, and if you liked it please take a second to share it! This was definitely a good read. Just by examining your examples, I learned more about the 3 choices than I knew before. Keep up the good work. Copyright: Image by StockUnlimited. A simple XML document looks like this:. Here is the code for creating our example document with XMLWriter :. Here is the code to generate our example document with DOM:. The main issue with DOM is its relatively poor performance for large documents.

Error Handling Tip: Use the libxml functionality to retrieve all XML errors when loading the document and then iterate over the errors. The following example tries to load a broken XML string:. Assume we have an XML file called " note. This function returns the number of bytes read from the file mentioned in the first argument.

The uses of this function are shown in the following two examples. In this example, we will create an HTML file with the following code, where the file name will be passed as a parameter of the URL named path , and the value of this parameter will be passed to the PHP file named download.

We will create the PHP file with the following code to download the file forcibly. Next, the header function is used to set the necessary header information before using the readfile function.

The basename function is used to retrieve the filename, and the filesize function is used to read the size of the file in bytes, which will be shown in the opening dialog box to download the file. The flush function is used to clear the output buffer.

The readfile function is used with the filename only, here.