Remove namespace from XML using PHP

Question

I have an XML document that looks like this:

Answer 1

I found the answer above to be helpful, but it didn't quite work for me. This ended up working better:

// Gets rid of all namespace definitions 
$xml_string = preg_replace('/xmlns[^=]*="[^"]*"/i', '', $xml_string);

// Gets rid of all namespace references
$xml_string = preg_replace('/[a-zA-Z]+:([a-zA-Z]+[=>])/', '$1', $xml_string);