XML file convert to PHP array

I have a huge XML file, that i want to encode to a PHP array. I tried everything what i found on the internet, but it always throw errors.

If i tried to convert into XML object like this


$xml_object = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);

then i got an error: String could not be parsed as XML

I tried with DOMDocument, but it returns an empty object:


$xml_object = new DOMDocument();
$xml_object->load($xml);