6

I have the following XML sitting in a var called RoomPriceInfo in javascript:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<BkgItemHotelRoomPrices CurrCode="EUR">
  <RoomType Code="DB" Count="1" Desc="Double" Age="0">
    <PriceInfo EndDate="2011-12-17" AgentMarkup="0.0" MarkupPerc="0.1075" FitRdg="0.25"  MarkupPrice="48.73" AgentPrice="48.75" StartDate="2011-12-11" Nights="7" FitRdgPrice="48.75" CurrDec="2" CurrDecPrice="48.75" SuppPrice="44.0"/>
  </RoomType>
</BkgItemHotelRoomPrices>

and the following code:

DBRoomPrice = RoomPriceInfo.doXPath("//RoomType[@Code='DB']");
alert(DBRoomPrice[0].children.length);

Under FF7 on Ubuntu and FF8 on WinXP I get an alert of 1 which is correct. However under IE8 on WinXP and IE9 on Windows 7 nothing happens. It just dies silently.

Please can anyone shed any light on this? If I do a getElementById on the DOM object and then ask for children on that, then IE8 & IE9 behave correctly.

Rob W
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nexar
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  • Please don't sign your questions with your name, we can see it on your user badge at the bottom right. See the FAQ for more details: http://stackoverflow.com/faq – Polynomial Nov 21 '11 at 10:21

2 Answers2

15

Internet Explorer (including version 11!) does not support the .children property om XML elements.

If you want to get the number of child elements, use element.childElementCount (IE9+):

element.children.length;   // Does not work in IE on XML elements
element.childElementCount; // Works in every browser

If you merely want to know whether an element has any children, you can also check whether element.firstElementChild (or element.lastElementChild) is not null. This property is supported in IE9+:

element.children.length === 0;      // All real browsers
element.firstElementChild !== null; // IE 9+

If you want to iterate through all child elements of the XML node, use childNodes and exclude the non-element nodes via their nodeType:

for (var i = 0, len = element.childNodes.length; i < l; ++i) {
    var child = element.childNodes[i];
    if (child.nodeType !== 1/*Node.ELEMENT_NODE*/) continue;
    // Now, do whatever you want with the child element.
}
Rob W
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0

It may not solve the problem but.. you should use childNodes instead of children property to access the children nodes. I'm not sure which one is better, but I know for sure childNodes is wide supported.. may be Microsoft did it also like this?!

itnix
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    `childNodes` also include text nodes (not just elements), so that's not a good general solution. – Rob W Oct 08 '13 at 13:34