What is a good javascript library to deal with parsing XML strings into nodes and back?

Question

The codebase keeps files in XML format and javascript receives them via ajax and currently manually parses them into element nodes by doing the "div.innerHTML" trick, but this fails in fringe cases.

Is there a javascript library with a lot of XML capabilities already built in?

Answer 1

jquery has really great xml support.

http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorials/xml-parsing-with-jquery

Answer 2

You should really use jQuery.

Answer 3

There's no need for a library. All modern browsers have a built-in XML parser, and all you need is a function to detect which flavour of parser the user's browser has, such as the following:

var parseXml;

if (window.DOMParser) {
    parseXml = function(xmlStr) {
        return ( new window.DOMParser() ).parseFromString(xmlStr, "text/xml");
    };
} else if (typeof window.ActiveXObject != "undefined" && new window.ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")) {
    parseXml = function(xmlStr) {
        var xmlDoc = new window.ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
        xmlDoc.async = "false";
        xmlDoc.loadXML(xmlStr);
        return xmlDoc;
    };
} else {
    parseXml = function() { return null; }
}

var xml = parseXml("<foo>Stuff</foo>");
if (xml) {
    window.alert(xml.documentElement.nodeName);
}

Answer 4

There's the ancient Google AJAXSLT, apparently not touched since 2008 but unlikely to have gone seriously out of date.