Mellentine Design

FLASH: Recursively parse XML into an array

Posted by Jared Mellentine
December 1, 2007

Flash does not make it easy to handle XML. I’ve used some really bad code to help me parse arrays until I came up with this. It doesn’t handle elements of the same name at the same level, but it can probably be modified to do so.

var myParsedXML = new Array();
 
var myXML = new XML();
myXML.ignoreWhite = true;
myXML.onLoad = function(success) {
  if (success) {
    parseXML(myXML);
  }
};
 
myXML.load("data.xml");
function parseFile(xmlData) {
  var mainXMLElement = xmlData.firstChild.childNodes;
  for (var i = 0; i &lt; mainXMLElement.length; i++) {
    myParsedXML.push(intoArray(mainXMLElement[i]));
  }
}
 
function intoArray(xml_element){
  var xml_array = new Array();
  if (xml_element.hasChildNodes()) {
    for (var cn = 0; cn &lt; xml_element.childNodes.length; cn++) {
      if (xml_element.childNodes[cn].nodeType == 1) {
        xml_array[xml_element.childNodes[cn].nodeName] = xml_element.childNodes[cn].firstChild;
        if (xml_element.childNodes[cn].attributes) {
          xml_array[xml_element.childNodes[cn].nodeName].attributes = xml_element.childNodes[cn].attributes;
        }
      }
      else {
        xml_array[xml_element.childNodes[cn].nodeName] = intoArray(xml_element.childNodes[cn]);
      }
    }
    return xml_array;
  }
}