All XML handling based on libxml2
<?php
$dom = new domDocument;
$dom->load('data.xml');
?>
XSL
<?php
$domxsl = domDocument::load('stylesheet.xsl');
$proc = new xsltProcessor;
$proc->importStyleSheet($domxsl);
echo $proc->transformToXML($dom);
?>
XPath
<?php
$ctx = new domXPath($dom);
$result = $ctx->query('/breakfast_menu/food[@itemno > 3]/price/text()');
foreach($result as $node) {
  echo $node->nodeValue."<br />\n";
}
?>
menu.xml
<?php
class entities_filter extends php_user_filter {
  function filter($in, $out, &$consumed, $closing) {
   while ($bucket = stream_bucket_make_writeable($in)) {
     $bucket->data = htmlentities($bucket->data);
     $consumed += $bucket->datalen;
     stream_bucket_append($out, $bucket);
   }
   return PSFS_PASS_ON;
  }
} 
stream_filter_register("entities", "entities_filter");
echo "<pre>";
readfile("php://filter/read=entities/resource=menu.xml");
echo "</pre>";
?>
Output
SimpleXML
<?php
  $menu = simplexml_load_file('menu.xml');
  foreach ($menu->food as $item) {
    echo "{$item->price}\t{$item->name}<br />\n";
  }
?>
Output