Indentation with DOMDocument in PHP

DomDocument will do the trick, I personally spent couple of hours Googling and trying to figure this out and I noted that if you use

$xmlDoc = new DOMDocument ();$xmlDoc->loadXML ( $xml );$xmlDoc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;$xmlDoc->formatOutput = true;$xmlDoc->save($xml_file);

In that order, It just doesn't work but, if you use the same code but in this order:

$xmlDoc = new DOMDocument ();$xmlDoc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;$xmlDoc->formatOutput = true;$xmlDoc->loadXML ( $xml );$xmlDoc->save($archivoxml);

Works like a charm, hope this helps

After some help from John and playing around with this on my own, it seems that even DOMDocument's inherent support for formatting didn't meet my needs. So, I decided to write my own indentation function.

This is a pretty crude function that I just threw together quickly, so if anyone has any optimization tips or anything to say about it in general, I'd be glad to hear it!

function indent($text){    // Create new lines where necessary    $find = array('>', '</', "\n\n");    $replace = array(">\n", "\n</", "\n");    $text = str_replace($find, $replace, $text);    $text = trim($text); // for the \n that was added after the final tag    $text_array = explode("\n", $text);    $open_tags = 0;    foreach ($text_array AS $key => $line)    {        if (($key == 0) || ($key == 1)) // The first line shouldn't affect the indentation            $tabs = '';        else        {            for ($i = 1; $i <= $open_tags; $i++)                $tabs .= "\t";        }        if ($key != 0)        {            if ((strpos($line, '</') === false) && (strpos($line, '>') !== false))                $open_tags++;            else if ($open_tags > 0)                $open_tags--;        }        $new_array[] = $tabs . $line;        unset($tabs);    }    $indented_text = implode("\n", $new_array);    return $indented_text;}

I have tried running the code below setting formatOutput and preserveWhiteSpace in different ways, and the only member that has any effect on the output is formatOutput. Can you run the script below and see if it works?

<?php    echo "<pre>";    $foo = new DOMDocument();    //$foo->preserveWhiteSpace = false;    $foo->formatOutput = true;    $root = $foo->createElement("root");    $root->setAttribute("attr", "that");    $bar = $foo->createElement("bar", "some text in bar");    $baz = $foo->createElement("baz", "some text in baz");    $foo->appendChild($root);    $root->appendChild($bar);    $root->appendChild($baz);    echo htmlspecialchars($foo->saveXML());    echo "</pre>";?>