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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T07:47:15+00:00

I’m having an issue with getElementsByTagName in IE (7 and 8). I have an

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I’m having an issue with getElementsByTagName in IE (7 and 8).

I have an address lookup that returns each suggested address (as a string of XML) into a PHP session variable, which is then accessed using an AJAX function that returns the requested session variable.

Each session variable is set in step 1 of the ajax address lookup (I have tried with without the character encoding and with utf-8):

$_SESSION['addrHint_' . $k1] = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>';
$_SESSION['addrHint_' . $k1] .= '<Address>';
$_SESSION['addrHint_' . $k1] .= '<Postcode>' . $v1->Postcode . ' </Postcode>';
$_SESSION['addrHint_' . $k1] .= '<Line1>' . $v1->Line1 . ' </Line1>';
$_SESSION['addrHint_' . $k1] .= '<Line2>' . $v1->Line2 . ' </Line2>';
$_SESSION['addrHint_' . $k1] .= '<Line3>' . $v1->Line3 . ' </Line3>';
$_SESSION['addrHint_' . $k1] .= '</Address>';

And then retrieved in step 2:

header('Content-Type: text/xml');
print_r( $_SESSION['addrHint_'.$_REQUEST['addr']] );

In the AJAX js, when the state is ready, it performs amongst other similar lines of code, this:

var xmlDoc = xmlHttp.responseXML;
var xmlRoot = xmlDoc.documentElement;
var postcode = xmlRoot.getElementsByTagName("Postcode")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
document.forms[0]["address"+addr+"_Postcode"].value = postcode.substring(0, postcode.length-1);

(It does a similar thing for each line of the address.) The length-1 snippet is in there because I had to append a space to each element to stop an issue I was having when an element was null.

It works fine in Firefox, but not at all in IE. I have since been Googling and found a number of results among the first 5 pages but no solutions. I’d be most grateful if anyone could shed some light on this.

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Instead of modifying your return values, maybe you should implement some error checking around the code that fetches your node values.

    If you do a ton of chaining you can’t check for nulls.
    Instead of chaining like this:

    xmlRoot.getElementsByTagName("Postcode")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue

    Why not add some error checking before hand?
    Something like:

    var postCodes = xmlRoot.getElementsByTagName("Postcode");
if( postCodes && postCodes[0] && postCodes[0].childNodes[0] ) {
    document.forms[0]["address"+addr+"_Postcode"].value = postCodes[0].childNodes[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
}

    That way you’ll only attempt the assignment if there’s no data there. Getting a blank input value where you expect it.

    Now, all that chaining and if statement can get tiresome, so you can wrap that in a function if you like.

    Feel free to check a working example here: http://jsbin.com/ahidu

    Cheers!

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