What are common issues when parsing XML files in PHP?

One common issue when parsing XML files in PHP is dealing with special characters such as &, <, >, ", and '. These characters need to be properly escaped or encoded to ensure the XML parsing is successful. One way to solve this is to use PHP's htmlspecialchars() function to encode these special characters before parsing the XML.

$xmlString = '<xml><name>John & Doe</name></xml>';
$encodedXmlString = htmlspecialchars($xmlString, ENT_XML1);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($encodedXmlString);