Question

I’m receiving data from the GMail API using $.ajax() with dataType: "xml", then throwing it into $.xml2json, which is a jQuery plugin. The problem is (as ironically demonstrated by the demo on the page) that when I put in something like this:

<animals>
     <dog>
          <name>Rufus</name>
          <breed>labrador</breed>
     </dog>
     <dog>
          <name>Marty</name>
          <breed>whippet</breed>
     </dog>
     <cat name="Matilda"/>
</animals>

I get this:

{
    animals: {
        dog: [
            {
                name: 'Rufus',
                breed: 'labrador'
            }, {
                name: 'Marty',
                breed: 'whippet'
            }
        ],
        cat: {
            name: 'Matilda'
        }
    }
}

Anyway, as you can see, in <animals> there are two <dog>s and only one <cat>; therefore, animals["cat"] is an object, while animals["dog"] is an array of objects. Likewise, when there is only one <entry> returned by GMail, feed["entry"] is an array of what is inside it, but when there is more than one tag, feed["entry"] is an array of entries, which in turn are arrays of what is inside them.

What I want to do is do different things, depending on whether I have 1 or more entries, using a conditional statement; to do that I need a boolean which tells me how many entries there are. How would I go about doing that? JQuery welcome.

EDIT: I guess another possible answer would be to edit the source of the plugin itself and make it offer some sort of way of knowing if it is a lone tag (an array-like object) or if there are lots of them (a "true" array).

Answer 1

You can use jQuery type() method to streamline your code and take advantage of fully cross browser compliant tests

API Refernce : http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.type/

$.each(data, function(i, item) {

    switch($.type(item)) {
      case 'string':
        /* string code*/
        break;

      case 'array':
        /* aray code*/
        break;

        /* ....etc*/
    }
});