xml_parser_create() creates a new XML parser and returns a reousurce handle referencing it to be used by the other XML functions.
The optional encoding specifies the character encoding of the XML input to be parsed. Supported encodings are "ISO-8859-1", which is also the default if no encoding is specified, "UTF-8" and "US-ASCII".
See also xml_parser_create_ns() and xml_parser_free().