CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jqueryxmlajax
Bin Chen
Bin Chen

Reputation: 63359

what's the best way to parse xml response in AJAX

I have a server that response the request with XML, I want to parse it in the javascript. I really like the actionscript xml parser that is really easy for me to use. I am wandering is there a very easy/straightforward way to parse the XML I fetched from server?

The ideal usage should be:

fetchXML new XMLParser. parser.parse access the document.

btw I plan to use jquery.

Upvotes: 18

Views: 49198

Answers (2)

wildpeaks
wildpeaks

Reputation: 7402

A regular $.ajax with dataType: "xml" will do the trick, then you can browse the contents with jQuery selectors like you would a simple web page (e.g. the attr function in the example to retrieve the "code" field of each book node or the find function to find specific node types).

For example, you could do this to find a specific book by title:

$(xml).find("book[title='Cinderella']")

where xml is the data the success handler receives from $.ajax.

Here is the complete example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
 <title>jQuery and XML</title>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
 <meta name="language" content="en" />
 <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body

<div id="output"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
 $.ajax({
  type: "GET",
  dataType: "xml",
  url: "example.xml",
  success: function(xml){
   $(xml).find("book").each(function(){
    $("#output").append($(this).attr("code") + "<br />");
   });
  }
 });
});
</script>


</body>
</html>

And a matching XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<books title="A list of books">
 <book code="abcdef" />
 <book code="ghijklm">
  Some text contents
 </book>
</books>

Upvotes: 23

Quentin
Quentin

Reputation: 944438

Return the data with the right content type (e.g. application/xml) and XHR will parse it for you.

See also: the dataType argument for jQuery's ajax method.

Upvotes: 3

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