With all the fancy XML parsers/serializers/deserializers around, you would almost forget there are built-in PHP functions for defining highly customized XML parsers. You can use the xml_* functions to assemble an XML parser step by step.

Setting up an XML parser - the procedural way

First, you create a new parser resource using

$encoding = 'UTF-8';
$parser = xml_parser_create($encoding);

The first and only argument of this function is the target encoding of the parser.