By "persist", do you mean that the data read from the file will be available after the while loop's done? If so, declare your variable(s) before the loop, outside the loop's body.

EDIT: OK, scratch that, I misunderstood your question. (It's a Sunday night, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.) Looking at your sample XML snippet (not well-formed, BTW), it seems that $reader->localName equals "price" twice, when the price tag gets opened and when it gets closed. So $price gets set correctly, but then overwritten again.

The easiest (quickest, dirtiest) way to deal with that is to use ||= or //=:

while($reader->read) {
    $price //= $reader->readInnerXml if $reader->localName eq 'price';
}

print $price;
[download]

This will only assign to $price if $price is false (||=) or undefined (//=), and leave it be otherwise.