CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptjqueryxml
jason
jason

Reputation: 4801

Forced to deal with a & in an XML file, trying to resolve parse error $.ajax({...})

Im forced to deal with an XML file that has multiple & in it, similar to :

<row>
    <value>Boys & Girls</value>
</row>

Heres my method :

$.ajax({
    type : "POST",
    url : "data.xml",
    dataFilter : XMLFilter, //handles raw response data of XMLHttpRequest. pre-filtering to sanitize response. 
    async : false, //false means this has to complete before continuing
    success : XMLLoadedSuccess, //to be called if the request succeeds. 
    error : function (XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) { debugger; },
    complete : XMLLoadedComplete //called when the request finishes after success / error callbacks are executed
});

The error is reported as :

textStatus : parse error
errorThrown : InvalidXML

Digging into the error, Im 99.99% sure its the & symbol peppered throughout.

I thought maybe the dataFilter parameter could be used to sanitize the response, but that seems to be called only after success. I was trying to do something like 

function XMLFilter(data, type) {

    data = data.replace("&", "and");

    return data;
}

with it, but thats aparently not how to do this.

Then I thought, use php to load / filter out the & and write a new XML file, and have jQuery use that. This might work, but the XML file is like 500k in size. So maybe have a cron job that only does that once a day when the new XML is generated.

Bashing the person responsible for allowing the & in there is also an option but I dont see how it will help the end user.

Whats a good way to handle this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 73

Answers (1)

M. Page
M. Page

Reputation: 2814

Your $.ajax() doesn't specify dataType. Because url setting has .xml extension, JQuery infers the transferred data are XML (see: http://api.jquery.com/jquery.ajax). This is wrong because of & incorrect encoding. You have to indicate that you want to transfer data as text with dataType: 'text' and then you process them.

In your case, data processing involves three steps:

  1. replacing "&" with the corresponding XML entity: "&amp;"
  2. convert the resulting string to XML.
  3. processing the resulting XML

This can be written:

$.ajax({
  ...
  url: "data.xml",
  dataType: 'text',
  success: function(data) {
                var xml = jQuery.parseXML(data.replace("&", "&amp;"));
                process(xml);
            },
  ...
});

Upvotes: 2

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