I'm trying to figure out how to delete an element (and its children) from a xml file that is very large in php (latest version).

I know I can use dom and simpleXml, but that will require the document to be loaded into memory.

I am looking at the XML writer/reader/parser functions and googling, but there seems to be nothing on the subject (all answers recommend using dom or simpleXml). That cannot be correct--am I missing something?

The closest thing I've found is this (C#):

You can use an XmlReader to sequentially read your xml (ReadOuterXml might be useful in your case to read a whole node at a time). Then use an XmlWriter to write out all the nodes you want to keep. ( Deleting nodes from large XML files )

Really? Is that the approach? I have to copy the entire huge file?

Is there really no other way?

One approcah

As suggested,

I could read the data using phps XML reader or parser, possibly buffer it, and write/dump+append it back to a new file.

But is this approach really practical?

I have experience with splitting huge xml files into smaller pieces, basically using suggested method, and it took a very long time for the process to finish.

My dataset isn’t currently big enough to give me an idea on how this would work out. I could only assume that the results will be the same (a very slow process).

Does anybody have experience of applying this in practice?