The DOM extension allows you to operate on XML documents through the DOM API with PHP 5.
For PHP 4, use DOM XML.
Hinweis:
The DOM extension uses UTF-8 encoding. Use utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() to work with texts in ISO-8859-1 encoding or Iconv for other encodings.
this module parse and decode XML into utf-8 characters for no matter what the encoding is in you source XML, therefore use carefully for some not-so-standard encoding like "big5-hkscs"