PHP: Creating / Generating XML results

Despite with all the new web technologies around us, I guess that XML is something that wouldn't die out so easily. Especially that its a friendly file type that can be opened by different browsers and softwares. Ex: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Excel, etc... Therefore I'm going to share an example using php that would display the results as a xml data.

But let me show you the codes first.

Here's a simple php file that contains the necessary functions.

<?php
 //Header needed to display content as xml
 header ("Content-Type:text/xml");

 //function to create xml node
 //if $hasIllegalCharacters is true, then we will use CDATA to wrap the node values
 function createNode($nameOfNode, $valueOfNode, $hasIllegalCharacters=true)
 {
  $result = "";
  $result .= "<" . $nameOfNode . ">";
  if($hasIllegalCharacters)
  {
   $result .= "<![CDATA[";
  }
  $result .= $valueOfNode;
  if($hasIllegalCharacters)
  {
   $result .= "]]>";
  }
  $result .= "</" . $nameOfNode . ">";
  return $result;
 }

 //function to save result as xml file
 function createAttachment($filename)
 {
  header('content-disposition: attachment; filename='.$filename.'.xml');
 }
?>

The following would be the source codes of the example

<?php
 //include the xml custon library
 include("php/library/xml/XmlMainClass.php");
  
 //Create the nodes and populate the nodes with data
 $message = createNode("message", 'Meow !@#$%^&*()-=_+{}[]\|:"'.";'<>?,./`~");
 $lat = createNode("lat", "1.281270");
 $lng = createNode("lng", "103.825318");
 $coordinates = createNode("coordinates", $lat . $lng, false);
 $country = createNode("country", "Singapore");
 $street = createNode("street", "Jalan Membina");
 $address = createNode("address", $street . $country . $coordinates, false);
 $dob = createNode("dob", "></></><");
 $age = createNode("age", "28++");
 $name = createNode("name", "nekyouto");
 $profile = createNode("profile", $name.$age.$dob.$address.$message, false);

 //Output the results
 echo $profile;
?>

A similar example to the previous one but this time round rather than displaying the results, it will create a downloadable xml file.

<?php
 //include the xml custon library
 include("php/library/xml/XmlMainClass.php");
  
 //Create the nodes and populate the nodes with data
 $message = createNode("message", "Meow !@#$%^&*()-=_+{}[]\|:\";'<>?,./`~");
 $lat = createNode("lat", "1.281270");
 $lng = createNode("lng", "103.825318");
 $coordinates = createNode("coordinates", $lat . $lng, false);
 $country = createNode("country", "Singapore");
 $street = createNode("street", "Jalan Membina");
 $address = createNode("address", $street . $country . $coordinates, false);
 $dob = createNode("dob", "></></><");
 $age = createNode("age", "28++");
 $name = createNode("name", "nekyouto");
 $profile = createNode("profile", $name.$age.$dob.$address.$message, false);

 createAttachment("profile");
 //Output the results
 echo $profile;
?>

* Click here to view the demo of the first example.
^ Click here to view the demo of the second example.
~ Click here for the source files of this demo.