Question

I have an XML like this

<resultGroups> 
    <subGroups>
        <results> </results>
        <results> </results>
    </subGroups>
    <subGroups>
        <results> </results>
        <results> </results>
    </subGroups>    
    <name> </name>
</resultGroups>
<resultGroups> 
    <subGroups>
        <results> </results>
        <results> </results>
    </subGroups>
    <subGroups>
        <results> </results>
        <results> </results>
    </subGroups>    
    <name> </name>
</resultGroups>

I have this code to select number of results inside each resultGroup

$('resultGroups', $(xml)).each(function() {
    count = $('results', this).length;
    arr[i] = count;
    i++;
});

What I want is to get the name from each resultGroup tag and store it in an array.
How can I do that inside the above code?

How can I select only the name tag of the first resultGroup only without .each function?

Answer 1

If your XML looks like this:

<resultGroups> 
    <subGroups>
        <results> </results>
    </subGroups>
    <subGroups>
        <results> </results>
    </subGroups>    
    <name>myname</name>
</resultGroups>
<resultGroups> 
    <subGroups>
        <results> </results>
        <results> </results>
    </subGroups>
    <subGroups>
        <results> </results>
        <results> </results>
    </subGroups>    
    <name>othername</name>
</resultGroups>

Using this code:

var groups = {};
$('resultGroups', $(xml)).each(function() {
    var count = $('results', this).length;
    var name = $('name',this).text();
    groups[name] = count;
});

After that, groups will be a dictionary (object, hence the {}) like so:

{'myname': 2, 'othername': 4}

Which you can access by doing groups.myname or groups['myname']

To get only the name tags directly in resultGroups tag – I didn’t see any other in the example code, so I didn’t know there were more – use this code instead:

var name = $(this).children('name').text();