SimpleXML is arguably the simplest and fastest way to parse XML documents that is natively available in PHP.

<?php
$xml 
'<articles>
<article id="1">
    <title>Something Happened</title>
    <author>Random Person</author>
</article>
<article id="2">
    <title>Something Else Happened</title>
    <author>Different Person</author>
</article>
</articles>'
;

/* load & parse XML string */
$art simplexml_load_string($xml);
foreach (
$art as $article) {
    echo 
'Id: ' $article['id'];
    echo 
'Title: ' $article->title;
    echo 
'Author: ' $article->author;
}
?>