It seems that all major browsers implement the DOMParser API so that XML can be parsed into a DOM and then queried using XPath, getElementsByTagName, etc…
However, detecting parsing errors seems to be trickier. DOMParser.prototype.parseFromString
always returns a valid DOM. When a parsing error occurs, the returned DOM contains a <parsererror>
element, but it's slightly different in each major browser.
Sample JavaScript:
xmlText = '<root xmlns="http://default" xmlns:other="http://other"><child><otherr:grandchild/></child></root>';
parser = new DOMParser();
dom = parser.parseFromString(xmlText, 'application/xml');
console.log((new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(dom));
Result in Opera:
DOM's root is a <parsererror>
element.
<?xml version="1.0"?><parsererror xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/xml/parsererror.xml">Error<sourcetext>Unknown source</sourcetext></parsererror>
Result in Firefox:
DOM's root is a <parsererror>
element.
<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/locale/intl.css" type="text/css"?>
<parsererror xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/xml/parsererror.xml">XML Parsing Error: prefix not bound to a namespace
Location: http://fiddle.jshell.net/_display/
Line Number 1, Column 64:<sourcetext><root xmlns="http://default" xmlns:other="http://other"><child><otherr:grandchild/></child></root>
---------------------------------------------------------------^</sourcetext></parsererror>
Result in Safari:
The <root>
element parses correctly but contains a nested <parsererror>
in a different namespace than Opera and Firefox's <parsererror>
element.
<root xmlns="http://default" xmlns:other="http://other"><parsererror xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" style="display: block; white-space: pre; border: 2px solid #c77; padding: 0 1em 0 1em; margin: 1em; background-color: #fdd; color: black"><h3>This page contains the following errors:</h3><div style="font-family:monospace;font-size:12px">error on line 1 at column 50: Namespace prefix otherr on grandchild is not defined
</div><h3>Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.</h3></parsererror><child><otherr:grandchild/></child></root>
Am I missing a simple, cross-browser way of detecting if a parsing error occurred anywhere in the XML document? Or must I query the DOM for each of the possible <parsererror>
elements that different browsers might generate?
Best Answer
This is the best solution I've come up with.
I attempt to parse a string that is intentionally invalid XML and observe the namespace of the resulting
<parsererror>
element. Then, when parsing actual XML, I can usegetElementsByTagNameNS
to detect the same kind of<parsererror>
element and throw a JavascriptError
.Note that this solution doesn't include the special-casing needed for Internet Explorer. However, things are much more straightforward in IE. XML is parsed with a
loadXML
method which returns true or false if parsing succeeded or failed, respectively. See http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_parser.asp for an example.