XMLReader punts on clone

PHP5’s XMLReader – which I used for my JSON-Like XML post, doesn’t implement a ‘clone’ handler, which came as quite a shock when I attempted to implement a wrapper class that would allow me to push values back into the stream when I had to read-ahead to implement ‘nested data structures’ as suggested by Davey. I had a hard time finding a good example of how to internally implement clone (even Sara Golemon’s book only gives it a brief mention¹), but I finally came up with something – I’m building it now to see how well it works, or even if it works at all.

¹ zend_object_value clone_obj(zval *object TSRMLS_DC) – Used to generate a new object copied from an already instantiated one. The default behavior is to create a new object instance, associate the original’s handler table with it, copy the properties table and, if the class entry for the object in question defines a __clone() method, call that to allow the new object to perform additional duplication work.