The XMLWriter extension escapes my input for me as expected instead of requiring me to escape the input first.

You can have simplicity or completeness, but you can't have them both at the same time. SimpleXML offers simplicity through its magic method ($sxml->child) and completeness through addChild().

If you don't want to bother with escaping, use
   $sxml->child1 = 'One & Two';

If you need to bypass escaping, use
   $sxml->addChild('child1', 'One & Two');

Without addChild(), or if addChild() was identical to the magic method, it would be impossible to use XML entities, eg   would need to be replaced by the actual character if the document's encoding. And if that character was not available in that encoding (or charset, rather) then it would simply be impossible to use.

That's why addChild()'s behaviour is both desirable and needed.

However when I do 
$xml->child = 'One & Two';

it does not work it results in 

echo (string)$xml->child;

printing "One ";

As I tried doing that to see if it was just the "function" being ODD or the whole SimpleXML.

Basically this behavior has made simpleXML useless to me now.  I either have to use the standard DOM interface, use XMLWriter (which I ended up rewriting the code that had this issue to use XMLWriter instead).  OR write my own wrapper class around simpleXML that does the same behavior with respect to escaping that the rest of the XML APIs in PHP do.

That's not SimpleXML's normal behaviour, and I couldn't reproduce it on PHP 5.2.6-pl1-gentoo (cli) (built: May 26 2008 02:58:50) + libxml 2.6.31

Check out your PHP version and libxml version, perhaps you're unknowingly running an older release.


Reproduce code:
---------------
$sxml=new SimpleXMLElement('<test></test>');

$sxml->child1 = 'One & Two';
echo $sxml->child1, "\n";

$sxml->child1 = 'One &amp; Two';
echo $sxml->child1, "\n";

Actual result:
--------------
One & Two
One &amp; Two

OK.. that code works fine on PHP 5.2.4, 5.2.5, and 5.2.6. However if you don't predefine the element and update it's contents it was expecting it to be "escaped".  Which is fixed on my fresh build of 5.2.6. (though wasn't clearly documented in the changelog (bug #44478))

(I have multiple version of PHP, that I'm unifying up to current).

Still,  this behavior is not documented in the documentation.

Should I file a new bug on the documentation to have it updated? or just switch this one to "Add* methods for simpleXML need documentation updated to show that input needs to be xml entity encoded"?

Is addAttribute supposed to work the same way as addChild?? As currently it does not (tested in 5.2.5 and 5.2.6)

Also

$xml = new SimpleXmlElement('<test/>');
$xml['attribute'] = "my val";

does not work it throws an error (5.2.6) claiming that the "objects don't support array access operators".

Please describe what exactly should be documented.

No feedback was provided for this bug for over a week, so it is
being suspended automatically. If you are able to provide the
information that was originally requested, please do so and change
the status of the bug back to "Open".