DOM

The DOM extension in PHP is an extension that allows developers to work with XML documents using the Document Object Model, DOM, API. It provides a set of classes and functions to parse, manipulate, and generate XML documents.

The DOM extension provides a tree-based representation of an XML document, where each element, attribute, and text node is represented as an object. This allows developers to traverse and manipulate the XML document easily.

<?php

// from PHP manual : https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.domcomment.php

   $xml = new DOMDocument();
    $xml->loadXML('<?xml version=\1.0\ encoding=\utf-8\?>
      <configuration version=\2\>
      <!-- test &#45;&#45;&gt; -->
      test &#45;&#45;&gt;
      </configuration>'
    );
$xpath = new DOMXPath($xml);
$comments = $xpath->query('//comment()');
$elements = $xpath->query('//configuration');

echo $comments[0]->textContent;
// result: test &#45;&#45;&gt;

echo $elements[0]->textContent;
// result: test -->

?>

Documentation

See also Using PHP DOMDocument: Code Examples Explained.

Related : Extensible Markup Language (XML), SimpleXML, XMLReader, XMLwriter, Unicode, Document Object Model (DOM)