I just want to mention that i ran into a problem when parsing an xml file using the character data handler. If you happen to have a string which is also an internal php function stored in your xml data file and you want to output it as a string the parser dosent seem to recognize it.
I found a way around this problem. In my case i was storing a string with the value read. This would not allow me to output the data so to work around this problem i added a backslash for every character in the data element.
e.g. <xml>
from <element>read</element>
to <element>////read</element>
i dont know if anyone has ran into this problem or not but i thought i would just put it here just so in case someone is getting stuck with this.