title: Best way to parse a large, nested XML sheet with PHP?
body: <p>I'm trying to parse a quite large XML-sheet with PHP, but I'm fairly new to it.
  The XML-sheet contains a couple of thousands of records.</p>
  
  <p>Here is an example of the structure used within the sheet:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;familyList&gt;
  &lt;family&gt;
  &lt;familyID&gt;1234&lt;/familyID&gt;
  &lt;familyDescription&gt;The Jonathans&lt;/familyDescription&gt;
  &lt;childrenList&gt;
  &lt;child&gt;Suzan&lt;/child&gt;
  &lt;child&gt;Fred&lt;/child&gt;
  &lt;child&gt;Harry&lt;/child&gt;
  &lt;/childrenList&gt;
  &lt;/family&gt;
  &lt;family&gt;
  &lt;familyID&gt;1235&lt;/familyID&gt;
  &lt;familyDescription&gt;The Gregories&lt;/familyDescription&gt;
  &lt;childrenList&gt;
  &lt;child&gt;Anthony&lt;/child&gt;
  &lt;child&gt;Lindsay&lt;/child&gt;
  &lt;/childrenList&gt;
  &lt;/family&gt;
  &lt;/familyList&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As I'm fairly new to XML-parsing using PHP, I wonder what would be the best way to parse this nested XML-sheet into an array. I need to convert the XML to an array so I can insert the data into a MySQL database afterwards.</p>
  
  <p>Could you please give me a push in the right direction as I haven't been succesful puzzling out a solution sofar?..</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>