February 22, 2002 - DOM Tree Representation of Entity References | WebReference

February 22, 2002 - DOM Tree Representation of Entity References

Yehuda Shiran February 22, 2002
DOM Tree Representation of Entity References
Tips: February 2002

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

The DOM tree creates a child for every entity reference. An interesting situation arises when an entity reference is embedded inside an XML string. Will the entity reference be a child of the whole XML string?

Let's look at an example. Here is the description element from our mydvd example:

<description>Sales Report for January, February, 
  and &lt;&month;&gt; of 2001</description>
The DOM tree splits the text of this description element to three nodes:

"Sales Report for January, February, and &lt;"
  • Entity reference:
    • April
  • Trail: "< of 2001"

    Let's show that indeed this is the case. First, we find the list of description objects:

    objNodeList = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("description");
    Our description is the first and only instance, so its index is 0. The following script prints the text values of description's three children:

    alert(objNodeList(0).childNodes(0).text);
alert(objNodeList(0).childNodes(1).text);
alert(objNodeList(0).childNodes(2).text);
    When running this script, you should get the three strings above.