Storing arrays in XML

Hay guys!

I have an array of items I wish to store in XML (since showing XML on teh intarweb is easy). Does anonymous have a good suggestion as to how?

My current implementation is simply separating each item with a semicolon, i.e. "item1;item2;item3;item4", but this is (a) annoying to split into items, and (b) annoying to put back into XML. Suggestions pl0x!

<array>
   <item>5</item>
   <item>penis</item>
   <array>
       <item>nested array with items</item>
   </array>
</array>


or even <item value="penis" />