Unfit For Print

Hacking XML2Object for Application Configurations

Posted by Ben Jackson Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:22:00 GMT

I use Sephiroth's XML2Object for my Flash configurations. Suffice it to say that it kicks ass.

<alumni>
    <name>Chuck Norris</name>
    <degree>Pain</degree>
</alumni>

However, the only thing that annoys me is that instead of referring to a value the way you'd expect--alumni.degree--you have to tack on a "data" variable (alumni.degree.data) to get to that node's data. This is (I'd imagine) so you can have text in the node as well as child nodes, like:

<alumni>
    <name>Chuck Norris
        <degree>Pain</degree>
    </name>
</alumni>

This is great for parsing HTML, but sucks for my purposes. Having to check for the (usually empty) .data var attached to each object in for...in loops is a bitch. And forgetting to tack it onto values from the config makes me appreciate this guy's state of mind . So, here's my revised version . The only thing that changed is the following lines on 64 and 65:

// old version, stores attributes and data for every node
__obj__.attributes = node.attributes;
__obj__.data = node.firstChild.nodeValue;

// new version, stores node value directly in the object 
// and ignores attributes and data
var data = node.firstChild.nodeValue;
if (!isNaN(data)) { data = Number(data) }
if (node.childNodes.length <= 1 && node.firstChild.nodeType != 1) { __obj__ = data; }

Enjoy.