PHP Manual: Dumps the internal XML tree back into a string

Description

public stringfalse DOMDocument::saveXML(DOMNodenull $node = null, int $options = 0)

Creates an XML document from the DOM representation. This function is usually called after building a new dom document from scratch as in the example below.

Parameters

node: Use this parameter to output only a specific node without XML declaration rather than the entire document.
options: Additional Options. The LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG and LIBXML_NOXMLDECL options are supported. Prior to PHP 8.3.0, only the LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG option is supported.

Return Values

Returns the XML, or false if an error occurred.

Errors/Exceptions

May throw a DOMException with the following error codes:

DOM_WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if node is from another document.

Changelog

Version	Description
8.3.0	LIBXML_NOXMLDECL is now supported.

Examples

Example #1 Saving a DOM tree into a string

<?php

$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0');
// we want a nice output
$doc->formatOutput = true;

$root = $doc->createElement('book');
$root = $doc->appendChild($root);

$title = $doc->createElement('title');
$title = $root->appendChild($title);

$text = $doc->createTextNode('This is the title');
$text = $title->appendChild($text);

echo "Saving all the document:\n";
echo $doc->saveXML() . "\n";

echo "Saving only the title part:\n";
echo $doc->saveXML($title);

?>

The above example will output:

Saving all the document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<book>
  <title>This is the title</title>
</book>

Saving only the title part:
<title>This is the title</title>

DOMDocument::saveXML