XML Parser

Most browsers have a build-in XML parser to read and manipulate XML. The parser reads XML into memory and converts it into an XML DOM object. There are some differences between Microsoft's XML parser and the parsers used in other browsers. Microsoft's XML parser is built into Internet Explorer 5 and higher. The Microsoft parser supports loading of both XML files and XML strings (text), while other browsers use separate parsers. I will show you how to create scripts that will work in both Internet Explorer and other browsers.

The following is an example that Javascript using Microsoft's XML parser to load an XML document ("gsp.xml") into the parser:

var xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xmlDoc.async="false";
xmlDoc.load("gsp.xml");

In the script above, the first line creates an empty Microsoft XML document object. The second line turns off asynchronized loading, to make sure that the parser will not continue execution of the script before the document is fully loaded. The third line tells the parser to load an XML document called "gsp.xml".

If the input is not an XML file, but a text string, then you need to change the third line to::

xmlDoc.loadXML(txt);

So the script should be:

var xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xmlDoc.async="false";
xmlDoc.loadXML(txt);

To use XML parser in Firefox and other browsers, we should use the following script:

var xmlDoc=document.implementation.createDocument("","",null);
xmlDoc.async="false";
xmlDoc.load("gps.xml");

If the input is not an XML file, but a text string, then you need to use a script like this::

var parser=new DOMParser();
var doc=parser.parseFromString(txt,"text/xml");

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