Converting text to DOM object

[Adonis]

I have an XML file hosted by my ISP free web space. It naively treats
the file as text/plain. I would like to convert this data into a DOM
object. So far my googling has turned up nothing, although looking over
the DOM manual on Mozilla I came up with:

function convertDOM(text)
{
var lines = text.split("\r\n");
var dom = document.createDocumentFragment();
for (var i = 0; i < lines.length; i++)
{
var node = document.createTextNode(lines[i]);
dom.appendChild(node);
}
return dom;
}

The returned object is not treated as an DOM object.
Anything I am missing / A different approach maybe?

Any help is greatly apprecited.

Adonis

[Adonis]

Adonis wrote:

I have an XML file hosted by my ISP free web space. It naively treats
the file as text/plain. I would like to convert this data into a DOM
object. So far my googling has turned up nothing, although looking over
the DOM manual on Mozilla I came up with:

function convertDOM(text)
{
var lines = text.split("\r\n");
var dom = document.createDocumentFragment();
for (var i = 0; i < lines.length; i++)
{
var node = document.createTextNode(lines[i]);
dom.appendChild(node);
}
return dom;
}

The returned object is not treated as an DOM object.
Anything I am missing / A different approach maybe?

Any help is greatly apprecited.

Adonis

Forgot to mention, the file is being retrieved using XMLHttpRequest,
which then the server replies with text/plain and filling the
reponseText property of XMLHttpRequest.

Adonis

[Martin Honnen]

Adonis wrote:

Adonis wrote:

I have an XML file hosted by my ISP free web space. It naively treats
the file as text/plain.
Then contact your ISP to change the server settings so that XML is
served as application/xml. Or ask them which file suffix they have
associated with the MIME type application/xml or text/xml, perhaps they
have choosen something else that .xml.

I would like to convert this data into a DOM
object.

Mozilla has a method overrideMimeType that allows you to get the
plain/text parsed by the XML parser, you can do

var httpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
httpRequest.open('GET', 'test2005071301.txt', true);
if (typeof httpRequest.overrideMimeType != 'undefined') {
httpRequest.overrideMimeType('application/xml');
}
httpRequest.onreadystatechange = function () {
if (httpRequest.readyState == 4) {
alert(httpRequest.responseXML.getElementsByTagName ('*').length);
}
};
httpRequest.send(null);

I don't know of any other browser implementing that method but Opera 8
seems to parse the response as XML even if it is not delivered with an
XML MIME type.
Not sure what Safari does.
IE with MSXML will not parse text/plain as XML so you have good reasons
to ask your ISP to change the settings.
As a workaround you can try to parse responseText with MSXML yourself
but you should be aware that the approach has shortcomings when it comes
to using encodings other that UTF-8. You would simply pass the
responseText to the loadXML method see
<http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/15302/fid/616>

--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/