Question

I am having a some problems in getting a node value from a XML file

My XML looks like this:

<item>
   <item1><Description>test</Description></item1>
   <item2><Description>test2</Description></item2>
   <item3><Description>test3</Description></item3>
</item>

And I am trying to get ‘test2’ from Item2 > Description.

I am able to get the xml file display in a alert messagebox but can’t seem to get the value i am looking for.

I am trying to do this in JavaScript and so far I have come up with the following:

function get_item()
{
    if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
      {// code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
      xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
      }
    else
      {// code for IE6, IE5
      xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
      }


      xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function()
       {

       if (xmlhttp.status==200)
         {
         //alert(xmlhttp.responseText);
          xmlDoc = xmlhttp.responseText;

            var item = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("Description")[0]; 
                item = item.childNodes.length ? item.childNodes[0].nodeValue : "" ;

             alert(item)

         } else
         {
         alert('Panel not communicating.Reason: '+xmlhttp.status);
         }
       }



    xmlhttp.open("POST","http://192.168.0.5/xml_file.xml",false);

    xmlhttp.send();
}

If I remove:

var item = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("Description")[0]; 
                    item = item.childNodes.length ? item.childNodes[0].nodeValue : "" ;

and change the alert to:

alert(xmlDoc)

it alerts my XML file, so i know it’s reading my xml file but can’t get the value.

Am I doing something wrong or is there a better way to get this value?

(I don’t want to use jQuery for this)

Answer 1

Use xmlhttp.responseXML instead of xmlhttp.responseText, I think there might be some issue with older versions of IE though, in which case you can try

xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xmlDoc.async=false;
xmlDoc.loadXML(xmlhttp.responseText);