php newbie question with xml files

I have an xml document storing some data I need. What I want to do is this: 1. Scan to the end of the file. 2. Find the closing tag. 3. Insert a new entry in before the closing tag. I've tried: 1. Creating new files and renaming them to be the original. 2. Writing the file to a dummy file and insert my lines part way through then finish the last tag. My problem is I'm looking for a </endtag> and it comes up as endtag. Is there anyway to force PHP to read the .xml file as a text file so it wont strip off the xml tag information? I've used fopen with fgets and fwrite, and file with fwrite Jared Sherman Totally lost newbie