Yes. substr and index, do not use them in a security conscious situation since they can't understand whitespace or reordering or element trees, only where you have control over what generated the xml. Much faster than loading up a XML parser. Do a index for the 'property_name="', add the offset going right to reach the '"', then another index to the next '"', then feed the 2 numbers to substr to get whats between the quotes.

        $start = 0;
        $beg = index($forms, 'method=POST>', $start)+12;
        $end = index($forms, '</blockquote>', $beg)+14;
        $body = substr($forms, $beg, $end-$beg);
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This is from a php website interface, that I know the template will never change, so index will always work.