javascript and XML...convert a file into a string

krraleigh · December 9th, 2009, 06:58 PM

Working through the Javascript book "Professional Javascript for Web Developers" by Wrox, author "Zakas".
In particular I am working through his section on how to handle XML processing in Javascript.

The author gives a really good function to handle converting an XML string into a DOM object for processing,
but the book stops short on suggesting a way to handle files. Now I can handle files in two of the three cases
using:

Code:

 
xmldom.load('myfile.xml') for IE &
 
//The DOM 3 Load and Save ..works in Opera.. 
var parser = document.implementation.createLSParser(document.implementation.MODE_SYNCHRONOUS, null);
//add event listener to determine when document has loaded
//code here...however...the load event never fires in 9.5..So I need to address this problem also
parser.parseURI('example.xml');

So the question is how do I convert an XML file to a string if my browser is using DOMParser?
Because this method will only take a string:

Code:

 
var parser = new DOMParser();
var xmldom = parser.parseFromString("<root><child/></root>", "text/xml");
// as you can see the above code only take a string, no other options here.

I was thinking that I could do a file read and use the string buffer function found in the beginning Javascript book. Is there a better way?
thanx kevin

nzakas · December 9th, 2009, 09:54 PM

I'm not sure I completely understand the question. If you want to read an XML file, your best bet is to use an XMLHttpRequest to retrieve the file and then get the string out of responseText (instead of responseXML):

Code:

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
var xmlText;
xhr.open("get", "file.xml", true);
xhr.onreadystatechange = function(){
    if (xhr.readyState == 4 && xhr.status == 200){
        xmlText = xhr.responseText;
    }
};
xhr.send(null);

This works in all browsers the same way.