Problem of building an associative array from xml

I'm trying to build an associative array from XML. Here is what xml looks like (total of about 70 'item' entries):

<xmldata>
<source>source</source>
<release>release</release>
 <item>
  <name>Name</name>
  <date>1/1/2015</date>
  <time>10AM</time>
  <value>24</value>
 </item>
 <item>
  <name>Name</name>
  <date>1/1/2015</date>
  <time>10AM</time>
  <value>24</value>
 </item>
etc
...
</xmldata>

Here is what I've tried so far:

$data = file_get_contents("xml url");
$xml = simplexml_load_string($data);
$counter = 1;
$new_array = array();
foreach($xml->children() as $item)
{
  if($counter > 2)
  {
    $temp_array = array('name' => $item->name, 'value' => $item->value);
    array_push($newArray, $temp_array);
  }
}

I'm trying to build an associative array that looks like this:

$new_array = array(array("name"=>name, "value"=>value),array("name"=>name,  "value"=>value),array("name"=>name, "value"=>value), etc);

It's not working. I try to print the array to see if it is formed but I get a list of 0-array, 1-array, etc.

I've also tried array_merge(), and $new_array[] = $item, and array_push($new_array, array("name"=>name, "value"=>value));

Is there a preferred way to append associative arrays onto an array? i.e. like array.append(dict) in python? Thanks much!

---

try like that

$data = file_get_contents("xml url");
$xml = simplexml_load_string($data);
$counter = 1;
$new_array =[];
foreach($xml->children() as $item)
{
    $new_array[$counter]['name'] = $item->name;
    $new_array[$counter]['value'] = $item->value;
    $counter += 1;
}