text to XML object (E4X) - netscape.public.mozilla.xml

Message from discussion text to XML object (E4X)

Martin Honnen

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More options Nov 2 2005, 1:06 pm

Newsgroups: netscape.public.mozilla.xml

From: Martin Honnen <mahotr...@yahoo.de>

Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2005 19:06:54 +0100

Local: Wed, Nov 2 2005 1:06 pm

Subject: Re: text to XML object (E4X)

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hluz wrote:
> I'm having a problem with creating a XML object from a document received
> via XMLHTTPRequest.
> The following code:

> var x = new XML(responseText)

> gives javascript error: xml is a reserved identifier.
> If I remove the <?xml version="1.0"?> line from responseText before
> using it, it works fine.

It is by design as the authors of the E4X specification wanted it, the
specification for
new XML(string)
says to do the following (13.4.2):
Let x = ToXML(string)
and ToXML(string) is specified as follows (10.3.1):
Parse the concatenation of
<parent xmlns=", defaultNamespace, ">", string, "</parent>"
So that way a conforming implementation has to parse e.g.
<parent xmlns=""><?xml version="1.0"?><root /></parent>
and that is not well-formed and gives a parse error.
Thus if you want to parse a string with XML markup make sure you throw
the XML declaration away before passing the string to new XML().

A regular expression to match the XML declaration is e.g.
var xmlDeclaration = /^<\?xml version[^>]+?>/;
so you could try removing it e.g.
new XML(responseText.replace(xmlDeclaration, ''))

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

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