How to echo XML file in PHP

You can use HTTP URLs as if they were local files, thanks to PHP's wrappers

You can get the contents from an URL via file_get_contents() and then echo it, or even read it directly using readfile()

$file = file_get_contents('http://example.com/rss');
echo $file;

or

readfile('http://example.com/rss');

Don't forget to set the correct MIME type before outputing anything, though.

header('Content-type: text/xml');

Here's what worked for me:

<pre class="prettyprint linenums">
    <code class="language-xml"><?php echo htmlspecialchars(file_get_contents("example.xml"), ENT_QUOTES); ?></code>
</pre>

Using htmlspecialchars will prevent tags from being displayed as html and won't break anything. Note that I'm using Prettyprint to highlight the code ;)

You can use the asXML method

echo $xml->asXML();

You can also give it a filename

$xml->asXML('filename.xml');

This worked for me:

echo(header('content-type: text/xml'));

If you just want to print the raw XML you don't need Simple XML. I added some error handling and a simple example of how you might want to use SimpleXML.

<?php 
$curl = curl_init();        
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories');   
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);   
$result = curl_exec ($curl);   

if ($result === false) {
    die('Error fetching data: ' . curl_error($curl));   
}
curl_close ($curl);    

//we can at this point echo the XML if you want
//echo $result;

//parse xml string into SimpleXML objects
$xml = simplexml_load_string($result);

if ($xml === false) {
    die('Error parsing XML');   
}

//now we can loop through the xml structure
foreach ($xml->channel->item as $item) {
    print $item->title;   
}