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And Now... How to Open an XML File in JavaScript for Web

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23 Oct 2018CPOL 15.6K   3   2
How to open an XML file in JavaScript for Web

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Introduction

Hello! This post will show you how to open and show XML files in JavaScript for Web.

This week, I posted "How to Open a JSON File in JavaScript for Web", and I tried for XML (to research my little acknowledgments). For this reason, I posted this article to show "How to open an XML file in JavaScript for Web".

Background

I follow the line of my post and I read something of this:

Code

Now we can train with a local XML variable and parse the XML format into childNodes:

HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>XML Test</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>XML Test</h1>
        <h2>Create a string from a XML array.</h2>
        
        <hr />

        <p id="demo"></p>

        <script>
            function StringToXMLDom(sXML) {
                    var xmlDoc=null;
                    
                    if (window.DOMParser) {
                        parser=new DOMParser();
                        xmlDoc=parser.parseFromString(sXML,"text/xml");
                    } else { // Internet Explorer
                        xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
                        xmlDoc.async="false";
                        xmlDoc.loadXML(sXML);
                    }
                    
                    return xmlDoc;
                }

            var XMLArray = "<bookstore>" +
                    "<book>" +
                        "<title>Everyday Italian</title>" +
                        "<author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>" +
                        "<year>2005</year>" +
                    "</book>" +
                    "<book>" +
                        "<title>La uruguaya</title>" +
                        "<author>Pedro Mairal</author>" +
                        "<year>2016</year>" +
                    "</book>" +
                "</bookstore>";
            
            var tbData = "";
            var xmlData = StringToXMLDom(XMLArray);
            
            if (XMLArray) {
                var tmp = xmlData.getElementsByTagName("book");
                
                for (var i = 0; i < tmp.length; i++) {
                    for (var j = 0; j < tmp[i].childNodes.length; j++) {
                            tbData += tmp[i].childNodes[j].tagName + ": "
                                    + tmp[i].childNodes[j].textContent + "<br />";
                        }
                        
                        tbData += "<br />";
                    }
                
                document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = tbData;
            } else {
                document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = "Error!";
            }
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

Well, we can start coding something! Let's write an XML file (I saved it as Books.xml):

XML
<bookstore>
    <book>
        <title>Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
        <year>2005</year>
    </book>
    <book>
        <title>La uruguaya</title>
        <author>Pedro Mairal</author>
        <year>2016</year>
    </book>
</bookstore>

Then we can write a WebPage with our JavaScript! Like this:

HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>XML Test</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>XML Test</h1>
        <h2>Create an array from XML string file.</h2>
        
        <hr />
        
        <p id="demo"></p>

        <script>
            function loadXML(callback) {
                    var xobj = new XMLHttpRequest();
                    xobj.overrideMimeType("application/xml");
                    xobj.onreadystatechange = function () {
                            if (xobj.readyState == 4 && xobj.status == "200") {
                                // Required use of an anonymous callback as .open will NOT 
                                // return a value but simply returns undefined in asynchronous mode
                                callback(xobj.responseText);
                            } else {
                                callback("<bookstore><book>
                                <value>Nothing</value></book></bookstore>");
                            }
                        };
                    xobj.open("GET", 
                    "Books.xml", true); // Replace 'my_data' with the path to your file
                    xobj.setRequestHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin","*");
                    xobj.send(null);  
                };
            
            function StringToXMLDom(sXML) {
                    var xmlDoc=null;
                    
                    if (window.DOMParser) {
                        parser=new DOMParser();
                        xmlDoc=parser.parseFromString(sXML,"text/xml");
                    } else { // Internet Explorer
                        xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
                        xmlDoc.async="false";
                        xmlDoc.loadXML(sXML);
                    }
                    
                    return xmlDoc;
                }
            
            loadXML(function(response) {
                    var tbData = "";
                    var xmlData = StringToXMLDom(response);
                    
                    if (xmlData) {
                        var tmp = xmlData.getElementsByTagName("book");
                        
                        for (var i = 0; i < tmp.length; i++) {
                            for (var j = 0; j < tmp[i].childNodes.length; j++) {
                                    tbData += tmp[i].childNodes[j].tagName + ": "
                                            + tmp[i].childNodes[j].textContent + "<br />";
                                }
                                
                                tbData += "<br />";
                            }
                        
                        document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = tbData;
                    } else {
                        document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = "Error!";
                    }
                });
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

That's It

It's a very quick scripting WebPage where we can handle local XML files. With this method, you can parse the XML into childNodes.

I hope that it'll be useful for you!

If you liked the post, spare some time to give me a vote/comment, it would be appreciated.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)


Written By
Software Developer
Argentina Argentina
I'm a Software Developer. I like to share knowledgements and I worked with C, C++, C#, VB, PHP, Java, and more...

Comments and Discussions

 
Questionxplat Pin
Lucas Vogel25-Oct-18 6:42
professionalLucas Vogel25-Oct-18 6:42 
Nice work! But, what if I'm running this on a Linux machine? Can you give us an example of how to do this using cross-platform modules from, say, NodeJS?
AnswerRe: xplat Pin
Matias Lopez25-Oct-18 8:15
Matias Lopez25-Oct-18 8:15 

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