How to create a tree of loadable nodes from a random XML file?

Question

PHP

Good time of the day.
I'm having difficulty creating a dropdown tree from a random XML file by loading nodes via ajax by clicking on them.
The whole problem is that the file was parsed using jQuery or PHP, I don’t know the exact structure, the name of the tags and the depth of nesting, so it’s impossible to sort through foreach, getElementsByTagName or through attributes. More precisely, if I know the entire structure for the current file through Simplexml,

$xml = simplexml_load_file("sample.xml");
$json = json_encode($xml);
$array = json_decode($json,TRUE);

but to write generic code for any xml i don't have enough knowledge.
In the articles I read, a tree of nodes is built based on the known structure and nesting.
If anyone has come across this issue, please let me know, I would really appreciate it.

Answer 1

I'm not counting on a TOP1 answer, but I think it's worth seriously considering using XPath . In theory, you can easily identify the clicked node, pass it to the XPath server, and that in turn, using XPath, return exactly what you need.