jQuery's selectors on string not working for Internet Explorer

Question

Hi everyone,

I make an ajax call with jQuery's "$.get" that returns a string to a function. This string contains both xml and html, and I have to extract some part of the html with jQuery's selectors, for example:

$.get(
    url,
    function (xml) {
        $(xml).find('something').whatever();
    }
);

In that case, everything works fine with Firefox and cie, assuming that the xml var is a string (headers text/html sent in php to be sure). But in IE, it can't find the "something" tag.

Any idea? This is very annoying!

Answer 1

Try to set the dataType to html.

$.get(
    url,
    function (xml) {
        $(xml).find('something').whatever();
    },
    'html'
);

Answer 2

Since its XML do try the following
$(xml).contents().find('something').whatever()

this something similar to accessing DOM within an Iframe <iframe>
UPDATE - Answer to Floren's comment
$(document).ready(function(){
var txt = "<hello><world/></hello>";
if (window.DOMParser) {
parser=new DOMParser();
xmlDoc=parser.parseFromString(txt,"text/xml");
}
else // Internet Explorer {
xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xmlDoc.async="false";
xmlDoc.loadXML(txt);
}
alert($(xmlDoc).find('world').length);
});

For parsing XML string from a local string variable you would have create a parser object specially for IE, may not be required for FF or others.
But for $.ajax if dataType is specified as 'xml' then this conversion is done automatically and we dont have to create the XML parser. Hope this helps you scenario.

Answer 3

I tried to simplify the problem:

var test = "<hello><world /></hello>";
alert($(test).find('world').length);

This is working just fine on every browser (displays 1) but not in Internet Explorer (displays 0, only tried on IE7). Do you have a clue to "fix" this problem, without having to change the format of the variable in XML?

Thx!