PHP: creating .docx document using .xml - php

Question

I'm working on a project where I need to create a .docx document. I was using PHPWord, loading a template and then saving the file. This document has a lot of nested tables and PHPWord is breaking the tables after some replaces in the template.
So I decided to save the document as Word XML document (.xml) and do the replaces myself. I will load the text into a variable, do the replaces and then save as a new word document. My problem is that I don't know how to create a .docx document using a .xml.
Would you have some code snippets I could use?
Thanks for any help
I have come to the piece of code below. It saves the file but when I try to open using word it gives me invalid document
$xmlString = simplexml_load_file($this->config->application->fileTemplateFolder.'coi.xml')->asXML();
$xmlString = str_replace('${coi_number}', $coi['application_number'], $xmlString);
$path = $this->config->application->fileTemplateFolder.'test.docx';
$zip = new ZipArchive();
$zip->open($path, ZipArchive::CREATE);
$zip->addFromString("word/document.xml", $xmlString);
$zip->close();

Answer 1

Here is how I solved the issue:
private function CreateWordDocument($xmlString) {
$templateFolder = $this->config->fileTemplateFolder;
if(!endsWith($templateFolder, '/'))
$templateFolder = $templateFolder.'/';
$temp_file = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), 'coi_').'.docx';
copy($templateFolder. 'coi.docx', $temp_file);
$zip = new ZipArchive();
if($zip->open($temp_file)===TRUE) {
$zip->deleteName('word/document.xml');
$zip->addFromString("word/document.xml", $xmlString);
$zip->close();
return $temp_file;
}
else {
return null;
}
}