Most of my XML parsing life is spent extracting nuggets of useful information out of truckloads of XML (Amazon MWS). As such, my answer assumes you want only specific information and you know where it is located.
I find the easiest way to use XMLReader is to know which tags I want the information out of and use them. If you know the structure of the XML and it has lots of unique tags, I find that using the first case is the easy. Cases 2 and 3 are just to show you how it can be done for more complex tags. This is extremely fast; I have a discussion of speed over on What is the fastest XML parser in PHP?
The most important thing to remember when doing tag-based parsing like this is to use if ($myXML->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT) {... - which checks to be sure we're only dealing with opening nodes and not whitespace or closing nodes or whatever.
function parseMyXML ($xml) { //pass in an XML string
$myXML = new XMLReader();
$myXML->xml($xml);
while ($myXML->read()) { //start reading.
if ($myXML->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT) { //only opening tags.
$tag = $myXML->name; //make $tag contain the name of the tag
switch ($tag) {
case 'Tag1': //this tag contains no child elements, only the content we need. And it's unique.
$variable = $myXML->readInnerXML(); //now variable contains the contents of tag1
break;
case 'Tag2': //this tag contains child elements, of which we only want one.
while($myXML->read()) { //so we tell it to keep reading
if ($myXML->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT && $myXML->name === 'Amount') { // and when it finds the amount tag...
$variable2 = $myXML->readInnerXML(); //...put it in $variable2.
break;
}
}
break;
case 'Tag3': //tag3 also has children, which are not unique, but we need two of the children this time.
while($myXML->read()) {
if ($myXML->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT && $myXML->name === 'Amount') {
$variable3 = $myXML->readInnerXML();
break;
} else if ($myXML->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT && $myXML->name === 'Currency') {
$variable4 = $myXML->readInnerXML();
break;
}
}
break;
}
}
}
$myXML->close();
}