How can I reconstruct a paginated XML document?

I’m reading from an API that returns paginated XML. The basic format of the API’s output is:

<candidates.list page="1" next_page="yes">
  <candidate />
  <candidate />
  <candidate />
</candidates.list>

My code is like this:

while (TRUE) {
  $xml_str = file_get_contents($dest)
  $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xml_str);

  // What should I do to append subsequent pages to my first page's XML?

  if ( $xml['next_page'] == 'yes' ) {
    $dest = $new_destination;  // I figure out the next page's API query here
  }
  else {
    break;
  }
}

return $xml;

Happy 4th of July, and thank you!!

Answer

SimpleXML was the wrong tool for the job. SimpleXML is not designed for adding new nodes, or doing any kind of manipulation really. I switched to using DOMDocument, and was quickly able to create a solution using the appendChild function.

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Answer