How to use XMLReader in PHP?

Question

I have the following XML file, the file is rather large and i haven't been able to get simplexml to open and read the file so i'm trying XMLReader with no success in php

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<products>
    <last_updated>2009-11-30 13:52:40</last_updated>
    <product>
        <element_1>foo</element_1>
        <element_2>foo</element_2>
        <element_3>foo</element_3>
        <element_4>foo</element_4>
    </product>
    <product>
        <element_1>bar</element_1>
        <element_2>bar</element_2>
        <element_3>bar</element_3>
        <element_4>bar</element_4>
    </product>
</products>

I've unfortunately not found a good tutorial on this for PHP and would love to see how I can get each element content to store in a database.

Answer 1

The accepted answer gave me a good start, but brought in more classes and more processing than I would have liked; so this is my interpretation:

$xml_reader = new XMLReader;
$xml_reader->open($feed_url);

// move the pointer to the first product
while ($xml_reader->read() && $xml_reader->name != 'product');

// loop through the products
while ($xml_reader->name == 'product')
{
    // load the current xml element into simplexml and we’re off and running!
    $xml = simplexml_load_string($xml_reader->readOuterXML());

    // now you can use your simpleXML object ($xml).
    echo $xml->element_1;

    // move the pointer to the next product
    $xml_reader->next('product');
}

// don’t forget to close the file
$xml_reader->close();