What potential issue is the user facing when trying to search for strings in the XML document?

The potential issue the user may be facing when trying to search for strings in the XML document is that they are not properly parsing the XML data before attempting to search for strings. To solve this issue, the user should use PHP's SimpleXMLElement class to load the XML data and then use XPath queries to search for specific strings within the document.

// Load the XML data into a SimpleXMLElement object
$xml = simplexml_load_file('data.xml');

// Use XPath to search for strings within the XML document
$results = $xml->xpath('//node[contains(text(), "search_string")]');

// Loop through the results and do something with them
foreach ($results as $result) {
    // Do something with the search results
}