Delete all elements of a certain type from an XML doc using PHP

Question

I have what should be an easy task: delete nodes and their descendants from an XML document, leaving other nodes.

I tried this code, but

Answer 1

When I was using the accepted answer it wouldn't remove all occurrences of the tag. The foreach loop would skip over tags probably because foreach relies on the internal array pointer and changing it within the loop leads to unexpected behavior.

A working solution that I've found looks like this.

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->load('places.xml');
$placesNodes = $dom->getElementsByTagName('places') 
while ($placesNodes->length > 0) {
    $node = $placesNodes->item(0);
    $node->parentNode->removeChild($node);
}
echo $dom->saveXml();