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');

You can use the asXML method

echo $xml->asXML();

You can also give it a filename

$xml->asXML('filename.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;   
}

Am I oversimplifying this?

$location = "http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories";
print file_get_contents($location);

Some places (like digg.com) won't allow you to access their site without having a user-agent, in which case you would need to set that with ini_set() prior to running the file_get_contents().

This works:

<?php
$XML = "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!-- Your XML -->
";

header('Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8');
echo ($XML);
?>

The best solution is to add to your apache .htaccess file the following line after RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^sitemap\.xml$ sitemap.php [L]

and then simply having a file sitemap.php in your root folder that would be normally accessible via http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, the default URL where all search engines will firstly search.

The file sitemap.php shall start with

<?php
//Saturday, 11 January 2020 @kevin

header('Content-type: text/xml');
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>';
?>
<urlset
      xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
            http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">

<url>
  <loc>https://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
  <lastmod>2020-01-08T13:06:14+00:00</lastmod>
  <priority>1.00</priority>
</url>


</urlset>

it works :)