How do I get the entire XML string from a XMLDocument returned by jQuery (cross browser)?

Question

I have tried and failed to find out how to get the entire XML string from the XMLDocument returned by a GET. There are a lot of questions on SO on how to find or replace specific elements in the object, but I can't seem to find any answer to how to get the entire document as a string.

The example I'm working with is from here. The "do something with xml"-part is where I'm at at the moment. I get the feeling that this should be really trivial, but I fail to find out how. Is there an "xml.data()" or similar that can be used for this purpose?

$.ajax({
    url: 'document.xml',
    type: 'GET',
    dataType: 'xml',
    timeout: 1000,
    error: function(){
        alert('Error loading XML document');
    },
    success: function(xml){
        // do something with xml
    }
});

The use case is that I want to feed the xml to flash plugin and for that I need the actual XML as a string.

Answer 1

You want it as plain text instead of XML object? Change dataType from 'xml' to 'text'. See the $.ajax documentation for more options.

Answer 2

If you want both, get the response as XML Document and as string. You should be able to do

success: function(data){
  //data.xml check for IE
  var xmlstr = data.xml ? data.xml : (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(data);
  alert(xmlstr);
}

---

If you want it as string why do you specify dataType:xml wouldn't then dataType:text be more appropriate?

Answer 3

If you only need a string representing the xml returned from jquery, just set your datatype to "text" rather than trying to parse the xml back into text. The following should just give you raw text back from your ajax call:

$.ajax({
    url: 'document.xml',
    type: 'GET',
    dataType: 'text',
    timeout: 1000,
    error: function(){
        alert('Error loading XML document');
    },
    success: function(xml){
        // do something with xml
    }
});