Question

What is the best way to clone a XML document in Javascript?

I tried doing

var newDocument = myDocument.cloneNode(true);

but that just returned null. I also considered doing

var newNode = myDocument.documentElement.cloneNode(true);

but that is not enough for my purposes, since this way the new node has the same ownerDocument as before.

Answer 1

You can do something like the following to clone a XML document:

var newDocument = oldDocument.implementation.createDocument(
    oldDocument.namespaceURI, //namespace to use
    null,                     //name of the root element (or for empty document)
    null                      //doctype (null for XML)
);
var newNode = newDocument.importNode(
    oldDocument.documentElement, //node to import
    true                         //clone its descendants
);
newDocument.appendChild(newNode);

• createDocument documentation
• importNode documentation