I had a chance to really play with PHPs native XML support.
It's interesting, but a little leaky in its abstraction. I had to futz around with the options to make it recognize CDATA sections, which involved passing options to libxml.
$xml = simplexml_load_file($file, 'SimpleXMLElement', LIBXML_NOCDATA);
Additionally, trying to serialize and unserialize SimpleXML objects is a dirty, hacky job. I didn't even bother trying to tackle that (though others have). In Short, native support for xml, isn't quite native inside of PHP.
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