<?php
//This is under the GPL3 license.
//$contents = @file_get_contents($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/stuff.xml');
//XML file must be ascii encoded!
$contents = @file_get_contents('SVGDemo.xml');
$parser = xml_parser_create(); // WORKS JUST FINE
$xmlArray=array();
$tags=array();
xml_parse_into_struct($parser, $contents, $xmlArray, $tags); //
print_r($xmlArray);
print_r($tags);
xml_parser_free($parser);
?>

a more complete XML parser with example of traversing the XML parsed array can be found at PHP XML-based Menu Generator on this site - code is also GPL'd.