You might want to take a look at VuFind's XCNCIP2 driver here:

https://vufind.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vufind/trunk/web/Drivers/XCNCIP2.php

This constructs requests in a crude way (simple string concatenation) but parses responses using SimpleXML.  SimpleXML is pretty user-friendly, but XML namespaces make it a little more complicated, and this code demonstrates namespaces in action.

I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have.

- Demian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Emily Lynema
> Sent: Monday, January 02, 2012 4:03 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] generating and parsing NCIP with PHP
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> We are working with Lehigh University on building out a more full-
> fledged
> SirsiDynix Symphony adapter to work with the XC NCIP toolkit. We will
> hopefully building our new Patron Account interface on top of the
> eXtensible Catalog NCIP toolkit.
> 
> Obviously, to build our new interface on top of the NCIP toolkit, we
> need
> to generate NCIP XML requests and parse NCIP XML responses. These
> things
> are a bit gnarly to work with, and I'm not sure that PHP is exactly
> known
> for excellence in working with XML. Has anyone ever dabbled in this
> area
> before? Created an awesome PHP library we could just pick up and use?
> Have
> any particular pointers?
> 
> We have Zend framework at our disposal in terms of PHP frameworks, and
> will
> likely be using that for this project. I don't know in particular if it
> has
> good XML parsing tools (my staff probably would), but even if it does,
> we
> still have to sort through the NCIP verbosity.
> 
> Just thought I'd check.
> 
> -emily