There is a way to remove a child element via SimpleXml. The code looks for a element, and does nothing. Otherwise it adds the element to a string. It then writes out the string to a file. Also note that the code saves a backup before overwriting the original file.
$username = $_GET['delete_account'];
echo "DELETING: ".$username;
$xml = simplexml_load_file("users.xml");
$str = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>
<users>";
foreach($xml->children() as $child){
if($child->getName() == "user") {
if($username == $child['name']) {
continue;
} else {
$str = $str.$child->asXML();
}
}
}
$str = $str."
</users>";
echo $str;
$xml->asXML("users_backup.xml");
$myFile = "users.xml";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
fwrite($fh, $str);
fclose($fh);