Parse XML string as PHP Array

I'm creating a RESTful webservice, right now I'm facing the insertion of the new resource (the Seasonresource). This is the body of the POST request:

<request>     <Season>        <title>new title</title>     </Season>  </request>

and this is the controller that effectively perform the insertion:

public function add() {      // i feel shame for this line :)      $request = json_decode(json_encode((array) simplexml_load_string($this->request->input())), 1);        if (!empty($request)) {          $obj = compact("request");          if ($this->Season->save($obj['request'])) {              $output['status'] = Configure::read('WS_SUCCESS');              $output['message'] = 'OK';          } else {              $output['status'] = Configure::read('WS_GENERIC_ERROR');              $output['message'] = 'KO';          }          $this->set('output', $output);      }      $this->render('generic_response');  }

The code works pretty well, but as I wrote in the snippet above I consider the first line of the controller really ugly, so, the question is: How can I parse XML string as PHP Array?

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