What is the fastest XML parser in PHP?

Question

for a certain project, I need some way to parse XML and get data from it. So I wonder, which one of built-in parsers is the fastest?

Also, it would be nice of the parser could accept a XML string as input - I have my own implementation of thread-safe working with files and I don't want some nasty non-thread-safe libraries to make my efforts useless.

Answer 1

The fastest parser will be SAX -- it doesn't have to create a dom, and it can be done with partial xml, or progressively. Info on the PHP SAX parser (Expat) can be found here. Alternatively there is a libxml based DOM parser named SimpleXML. A DOM based parser will be easier to work with but it is typically a few orders of magnitude slower.