Parse XML from File with Attributes (php)

I need to parse an XML file using PHP.

I have found tutorials that show how to load the file and also how to parse it with attributes, but no one puts the two together.

I understand that to load the file, I write: $xml = simplexml_load_file('file开发者_如何学JAVAname.xml');

The format of the xml file is such that the information I want is within tags. ex:

<match date="April 19, 2011" timezone="EST" status="Final" time="8:00 PM" formatted_date="19.04.2011" id="7342">

Let's say I want the date.

When I read about parsing xml with PHP I would expect to write:

$date =  match->attributes()->date;

but this just returns an empty result. I can't figure out how to link it with the file. In other words - how do I link the above line of code with $xml to get the content I want out of the file?

Thanks in advance, John

I swear to God, if you do REGEX PARSING to try to pull out attribute values of a structured document YOAR DOING IT WRONG!

Rather than "parsing", you probably want to use the DOMNode API to traverse the document using a query (written in XPATH) to find what you're looking for.