What are the potential pitfalls of not knowing the structure of an XML file when working with it in PHP?

Not knowing the structure of an XML file when working with it in PHP can lead to errors when trying to access specific elements or attributes. To avoid this, it is important to familiarize yourself with the XML file's structure beforehand. One way to handle this is by using functions like simplexml_load_file() or simplexml_load_string() in PHP to parse the XML file and navigate through its elements. 

$xml = simplexml_load_file('file.xml');

// Accessing specific elements or attributes
$element = $xml->elementName;
$attribute = $xml->elementName['attributeName'];

// Iterating through elements
foreach ($xml->children() as $child) {
    // Do something with each child element
}

Keywords

XML parsing PHP DOMDocument XML structure XML errors data extraction

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