Question

I’m currently looking for an easy way to extract information from server XML responses using JavaScript. jQuery seems like a good candidate for this.

When it comes to parsing XML with jQuery, I keep coming across code examples similar to the following snippet:

function parseXml(responseXml) {

    $(responseXml).find('someSelector')...

}

Yet, the jQuery Core documentation (quotation below) clearly states that you aren’t supposed to do that:

jQuery( html, [ ownerDocument ] )

html A string of HTML to create on the fly. Note that this parses HTML, not XML.

— http://api.jquery.com/jQuery/#jQuery2

This makes me wonder why so many online resources nevertheless suggest parsing XML via $(responseXml). Does this generally work without any problems, despite what the API documentation says? In what cases will parsing XML like this actually not work?

Answer 1

the jQuery ajax documentation adds http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/:

dataType

"xml": Returns a XML document that can be processed via jQuery.

…If the server reports the return data as XML, the result can be traversed using normal XML methods or jQuery’s selectors…

Also at http://api.jquery.com/jQuery/

When XML data is returned from an Ajax call, we can use the $() function to wrap it in a jQuery object that we can easily work with. Once this is done, we can retrieve individual elements of the XML structure using .find() and other DOM traversal methods.