What are the potential pitfalls of manually extracting content from XML files using PHP, as shown in the provided code snippet?
Potential pitfalls of manually extracting content from XML files using PHP include the risk of errors due to inconsistent XML structures, lack of error handling for missing elements or attributes, and inefficiency in handling large XML files. To mitigate these issues, it is recommended to use PHP's built-in SimpleXMLElement class to parse and extract data from XML files, as it provides a more robust and efficient way to navigate through the XML structure.
// Load the XML file using SimpleXMLElement
$xml = simplexml_load_file('data.xml');
// Access specific elements and attributes using object-oriented syntax
$title = $xml->book[0]->title;
$author = $xml->book[0]['author'];
// Output the extracted data
echo "Title: $title\n";
echo "Author: $author\n";
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