Order of Child Elements w/ php XML_Serializer

Question

I am using the php XML_Serializer library from Pear. http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.xml.xml-serializer.php

I would like to serialize something of the form

<a/>
<b/>
<a/>

where element order matters.

Does anyone know the format of the input for this? Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't think this is possible with XMLSerializer. The closest I think you can get is setting a default element name of a with the defaultTagName option and using a numeric key for 'a' values.

XML_Serializer is really designed as a simple serializer for PHP data structures (with its companion XML_Unserializer), much like the serialize() and unserialize() functions. Since PHP doesn't natively support a structure like this, XMLSerializer doesn't either.

XML_Serializer is also very old.

Have you considered using SimpleXML , XMLWriter or even DOMDocument for this? All three are built in to PHP, so you won't even need an external PEAR library.