Question

Well, this issue is making me mad. I think that I have a lack of knowledge in this aspect.

I am trying to parse a XML response, everything is ok but the problem is when I try to access to objects. I treat them like arrays and I always receive “undefined”:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
  <ajax-response>
   <response>
    <item>
      <name><![CDATA[ok]]></name>
      <value><![CDATA[true]]></value>
    </item>
    <item>
      <name><![CDATA[menuDiv]]></name>
      <value><![CDATA[Some HTML value]]></value>
    </item>
   </response>
  </ajax-response>

And here is the Jquery code:

xmlDoc = $.parseXML( xml ),
        $xml = $( xmlDoc ),
        $item = $xml.find( "item" );
        alert($item.length);
        $item.each(function(key, value){ 
            alert(typeof value);     
        });

This line alert(typeof value); returns “object”. However, if I do value[0] or $value[0] it returns “undefined”.

I would like to get “Some HTML value” from the object.

Answer 1

The value object passed into your iteration function will be an XML DOM node, in your case an Element with the tag name item. So you’d retrieve information from it by getting attributes from it, or looking at the text in any child TextNodes that it has.

You can wrap the element in a jQuery instance and use jQuery’s attr to get attributes, and text to get text.

I would like to get “Some HTML value” from the object.

That would be text — here’s an example:

$item.each(function(key, value){ 
    var $value = $(value);
    alert(typeof $value.text());
});

---

Here’s a full example that loops through the children of each item: Live copy | source

jQuery(function($) {

  var xml =
      '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>' +
      '<ajax-response>' +
          '<response>' +
              '<item>' +
                  '<name><![CDATA[ok]]></name>' +
                  '<value><![CDATA[true]]></value>' +
              '</item>' +
              '<item>' +
                  '<name><![CDATA[menuDiv]]></name>' +
                  '<value><![CDATA[Some HTML value]]></value>' +
              '</item>' +
          '</response>' +
      '</ajax-response>';

  var xmlDoc = $.parseXML( xml ),
      $xml = $( xmlDoc ),
      $item = $xml.find( "item" );
  display($item.length);
  $item.each(function(key, value){ 
    $(value).children().each(function(clave, valor) {
      display("$(valor).text() = " + $(valor).text());
    });
  });

  function display(msg) {
    $("<p>").html(msg).appendTo(document.body);
  }
});

---

Or if you just want to grab the value that’s the sibling of the name containing the text "menuDiv", the relevant bit is:

var menuDivText = $xml.find("item name:contains(menuDiv)").next().text();

Live example | source