E4X parsing caveat: Watchout for the Firefox-hidden Namespaces

A friend of mine was having issues with parsing an xml file using E4X today. We were trying parsing an XML file generated by a webservice and for all he tried, the nodes were completely inaccessible to his code. Viewing the XML in Firefox didn’t give any clues and everything should have worked. I have debugged exactly the same thing before so I was able to help but since I have seen developers do this more than a couple of times, I thought I should mention this: Loading an XML file within Firefox hides all Namespace declarations. To actually see the document as its coming in, view source on the document and all namespaces will be seen there.
The document he was parsing turned out to have a default namespace declaration in the root tag which means all the nodes were in that Namespace. The root tag of the xml document looked like:

[xml]

[/xml]
Here is the code to actually parse such a document:

[AS]
var u:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
u.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoadComplete);
u.load(new URLRequest(“document.xml”));

function onLoadComplete(event:Event):void{
XML.ignoreWhitespace = true;
var x:XML = XML(event.target.data);
var ns = x.namespace();
trace(“node value: “+x.ns::node1.ns::node2);
}
[/AS]

Note the ‘ns:: … ‘ prefix to the node-names you are trying to reach.

Hope this helps :).

More links on E4X and Flash:
Referencing ActionScript Reserved Words in E4X
Parse a document with namespaced nodes and a variable to be evaluated

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur