Question

ok so my responseText contains an ‘&’ character which seems to cause problems when parsing. so I want to grab my responseText and change the ‘&‘ for ‘&‘

I’m aware responseText is a String and ideally I want to feed this back into the responseXML to parse with the new xml with &

any help much appreciated

            responseXML  = xmlhttp.responseXML;
        var myResponseText = "<document-metadata><item><name>ccms_customer_key</name><value>0100000931012004110</value></item><item><name>ccms_customer_name</name><value>Mr Joe Bloggs</value></item><item><name>ccms_customer_salutation_name</name><value>Mr</value></item><item><name>ccms_rm_name</name><value></value></item><item><name>ccms_dms_key</name><value>2432559OEKM</value></item><item><name>ccms_customer_address</name><value>Main & Street Dublin </value></item></document-metadata>";
        /*
        if(myResponseText.indexOf('&') >= 0)    
        {
            var str = myResponseText.replace(/&/g,"&amp;");
            return str;
        }
        */
        //old line getSession().setAttribute('LH_METADATA_XML',xmlhttp.responseText);
        getSession().setAttribute('LH_METADATA_XML',myResponseText);

        // extract COMP_DMS_KEY from metadata
        var root = responseXML.getElementsByTagName('document-metadata').item(0);

Answer 1

Why not parse the string in a completely different way, such as with DOMParser or (may be what you need due to the error) document.implementation.createHTMLDocument(""), or even just creating a HTMLDivElement and setting innerHTML?

var doc = document.implementation.createHTMLDocument(""); // create a HTML document
doc.body.innerHTML = "<document-metadata><item><name>ccms_customer_key</name><value>0100000931012004110</value></item><item><name>ccms_customer_name</name><value>Mr Joe Bloggs</value></item><item><name>ccms_customer_salutation_name</name><value>Mr</value></item><item><name>ccms_rm_name</name><value></value></item><item><name>ccms_dms_key</name><value>2432559OEKM</value></item><item><name>ccms_customer_address</name><value>Main & Street Dublin </value></item></document-metadata>";
doc.body; // navigate to your root node from here

Doing this (i.e. using text/html rather than application/xml) will mean that the parser is less strict and not be troubled by the & whilst retaining the ability to use DOM methods.

From here you can now even re-serialize and convert this to a true XML document, say root is your root node

var x = new XMLSerializer(), p = new DOMParser(), xml_string, xml_doc;
xml_string = x.serializeToString(root); // now we have a valid string
xml_doc = p.parseFromString(xml_string, 'application/xml'); // and now it is an XML document