jquery xml parsing question

Question

Say I have xml like this:

<outer>
  <inner name="name0" type="type0" />
  <inner name="name1" type="type1" />
  <inner name="name2" type="type2" />
</outer>

I'm parsing the xml using jquery and I'm inside the each loop of the outer tag:

$(xml).find('outer').each(function() {
   //what goes here?
});

Say I know the values that can appear in the name id of <inner>. How do I, in the code above, get the appropriate type from the given <inner> tag.

Example:

I have the string var name = "name1" Inside the each loop, I need to pull type1 from the <inner> tag that has name="name1". Thanks

Answer 1

You can use an attribute-equals selector, like this:

var name="name1";
$(xml).find('outer').each(function() {
  var type = $(this).children("[name='" + name + "']").attr("type");
  //use type
});

You can give it a try here, if the XML is exactly what you posted and not a subset, just remove the .find('outer'), since the root element is already where you want to be.

Answer 2

var name = "name1";
$(xml).find('outer').each(function() {
   var type = $(this).children('[name=' + name + ']').attr('type');
});

Answer 3

I'm parsing the xml using jquery

Not really. $() does not include an XML parser; you are parsing it as HTML, using the browser's innerHTML parser. Because your input is not valid HTML, you might get any old strange DOM as the output, especially in IE, which doesn't like custom elements much.

It's annoyingly tricky to get an XML parser in a cross-browser way; it is much less well-supported than having XMLHttpRequest return an XML document. In many modern browsers you can ask for a new DOMParser, but for IE you have to create an MSXML2.DOMDocument ActiveXObject, and for a few older browser you have to document.implementation.createDocument (and even then the load method isn't standard or supported everywhere).