<p>I have used the XML Parser before, and even though it worked OK, I wasn't happy with it in general, it felt like I was using workarounds for things that should be basic functionality.</p>

<p>I recently saw SimpleXML but I haven't tried it yet. Is it any simpler? What advantages and disadvantages do both have? Any other parsers you've used?</p>

I would have to say
SimpleXML
takes the cake because it is firstly an extension, written in C, and is very fast.  But second, the parsed document takes the form of a PHP object.  So you can "query" like
```
$root->myElement
```
.