Confusion about child nodes of documenElement in XML DOM

Question

Hi,

Consider this xml as:-

book.xml

<bookstore>
    <book category="cooking">
        <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>30.00</price>
    </book>
    <book category="children">
        <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
        <author>J K. Rowling</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>29.99</price>
    </book>
    <book category="web">
        <title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title>
        <author>James McGovern</author>
        <author>Per Bothner</author>
        <author>Kurt Cagle</author>
        <author>James Linn</author>
        <author>Vaidyanathan Nagarajan</author>
        <year>2003</year>
        <price>49.99</price>
    </book>
    <book category="web" cover="paperback">
        <title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
        <author>Erik T. Ray</author>
        <year>2003</year>
        <price>39.95</price>
    </book>
</bookstore>

Now I get a XMLDOM object to be used in JavaScript using Firefox XML Parser using XMLHttpRequest.

Say the XML DOM is stored in variable

<script type="text/javascript">
xmlDoc=loadXMLDoc("books.xml");

x=xmlDoc.documentElement.childNodes;

for (i=0;i<x.length;i++)
  { 
      document.write(x[i].nodeName);
      document.write("<br />");
  }
</script>

outputs:-

#text
book
#text
book
#text
book
#text
book
#text

A total of 9 child nodes. Howcome ? I see that <bookstore> has only 4 child nodes as <book>.

Please help me in understanding this.

Thanks. Aiwee

Answer 1

The "#text" nodes contain the whitespace between the "book" nodes.