How do I put the contents of a web page into an xml parser?

I want to put the contents of a web page into an xml parser so that it will be easier to grab just the info I need.  Is there a way to do this?  The code I'm using to grab a web page is below.

<?php
 
$url = "http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/2009-standard-batting.shtml";
 
$str = file_get_contents($url);
 
function get_url_contents($url){
        $crl = curl_init();
        $timeout = 15;
        curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
        curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
        $ret = curl_exec($crl);
        curl_close($crl);
        return $ret;
}
 ?>

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