Unfortunately I don't have any control over the client. The problem is that the client is intentionally sending the semicolon as a delimiter (its written in C#). The other issue is the xml string could be a very large xml string with many semicolons. Ideally, I'd be able to simply replace the semicolons with pipes. I'm not really looking to do name value pairs since I need to do further processing of the XML before I handled the data that is delimited with semicolons. Any other advise? Here is another example if this is helpful:

# this line represents the xml that I would receive from a client.
$xmlstring = 
'<listofitems>
<item>
<itemid>1234</itemid>
<itemname>genericname</itemname>
<tablefield>1234;id</tablefield>
</item>
<item>
<itemid>1235></itemid>
<itemname>genericname2</itemname>
<tablefield>1235;id</tablefield>
<tablefield>1;specialtiem</tablefield>
</item>
</listofitems>';
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In my program I would then parse the xml data into other variables. The problem is that when I attempt to parse the data the semicolon in the tablefield xml tag screws it up. TIA.