Accessing E4X nodes having special characters in name without breaking binding chain in flex.

Question

I am using E4X to bind some values from xml in flex 3.

There is a problem when xml tag's (or attribute's) name has special character in it: having xml content

var xml:XML = <tag>
    <special-name att="val" />
</tag>

special-name could not be accessed using xml.special-name.@att because it is interpreted as subtraction, on the other hand using square bracket notation xml['special-name'].@att breaks binding chain.

Is there an elegant way to solve this (like special language syntax) without writing custom binding setters and listeners?

Answer 1

Would the child() function of the XML class work for you in that situation? I can't check it right now, but child() returns an XMLList and that should work for binding.

Alternatively, couldn't you just replace all "problematic" node names (storing the original names in a Dictionary with the replacement names being the keys) and then do the binding, simply avoiding the issue altogether?