Can XML be parsed reliably using jQuery's $(responseXML) syntax?

Answer 1

the jQuery ajax documentation adds http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/:

dataType

"xml": Returns a XML document that can be processed via jQuery.

...If the server reports the return data as XML, the result can be traversed using normal XML methods or jQuery's selectors...

Also at http://api.jquery.com/jQuery/

When XML data is returned from an Ajax call, we can use the $() function to wrap it in a jQuery object that we can easily work with. Once this is done, we can retrieve individual elements of the XML structure using .find() and other DOM traversal methods.

Answer 2

I do not know if my experience can be generalized, but I had my share of problems parsing SOAP messages with jQuery. This is probably not down to jQuery (as you point out the documentation disrecommends it).

Anyway, you asked for specifics: I found everything with namespaces to be problematic. Of course, for genuine namespace awareness, you'd need something that can resolve namespace prefixes to a namespace URI. I never expected jQuery to be able to do that, but even matching only prefixes didn't work out for me. This is especially problematic for me because the SOAP messages I am dealing with easily mix 4 or 5 namespaces. So I went back to doing DOM traversal myself to tackle this problem (which has its own set of problems)

That said, I do expect jQuery to be able to handle xhtml documents (as long as the tag names aren't prefixed), and I would expect it to work too for other xml documents that do not use namespace prefixes.

Answer 3

Your link actually points to the usage of jQuery( html ) that deals with creation of elements from strings, i.e.

$('<a href="..."></a>')

The one that your code uses is jQuery( element ) which is fine for XML.

since responseXML is XML, not a string, you're free to use jQuery() on it.