PHP's XML functions allow you to specify three functions that will handle the data in the XML file. One handles opening tags, one hands the data between tags, and the third handles the ending tags. Based on the name of the tags it gets passed you can then manipulate the data however you please. To begin with you need to look at your XML document and find out what tags are in the file. In our slashdot file we have STORY, TITLE, URL, TIME, AUTHOR, DEPARTMENT, TOPIC, COMMENTS, SECTION, and IMAGE. In some cases you would have attributes, and example is HREF is an attribute to A in HTML. PHP has an extremely cool way of handling attributes automagically.