How can cURL be used to retrieve an XML file or return an array instead of a string in PHP?

When using cURL in PHP to retrieve an XML file, the response is typically returned as a string. If you want to convert this string into an array for easier manipulation, you can use PHP's SimpleXMLElement class to parse the XML and convert it into an array. This can be achieved by creating a new SimpleXMLElement object with the cURL response and then using the json_encode and json_decode functions to convert the XML into an array. 

// Initialize cURL session
$ch = curl_init();

// Set cURL options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com/file.xml');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// Execute cURL session
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Close cURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Parse XML response into an array
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
$json = json_encode($xml);
$array = json_decode($json, true);

// Now $array contains the XML data in array format
print_r($array);

Keywords

cURL XML file array PHP string manipulation

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