Unable to extract data from XML file using javascript in Internet Explorer

Question

The following code works fine in firefox but as with many other things, I cant get it working in Internet explorer (any version).

Can anybody help?

<body>
   <script type="text/javascript">
        if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
            {// code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
                xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
            }
        else
            {// code for IE6, IE5
                xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
            }
        xmlhttp.open("GET","messages.xml",false);
        xmlhttp.send();
        xmlDoc=xmlhttp.responseXML;

        var x=xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("entry");
        for (i=0;i<x.length;i++)
            {
                document.write("<b>From:</b> ");
                document.write(x[i].getElementsByTagName("username")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue);
                document.write("<br />");
                document.write("<b>Date:</b> ");
                document.write(x[i].getElementsByTagName("date")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue);
                document.write("<br />");
                document.write("<b>Message:</b> ");
                document.write(x[i].getElementsByTagName("message")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue);
                document.write("<br />");
                document.write("<br />");

            }
    </script>

</body>

Please post the error that you're getting

Chetter Hummin
– Chetter Hummin

2012-06-29 07:52:24 +00:00
Commented Jun 29, 2012 at 7:52 — Chetter Hummin
– Chetter Hummin, Commented Jun 29, 2012 at 7:52

Brad · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-29 08:34:26Z

Two potential issues spring to mind:

Perhaps your AJAX communication is failing. In which case I would strongly urge you to use a library like JQuery to handle your communication. Then you don't have to worry about the browser compatibility issues
Secondly, the data coming back from the server is not sent with content-type("application/xml"). Different browsers may behave differently if they cannot reliably detect the content type and know that it's XML that you're expecting.

[Edit]

This is a full working example that I tested in IE7

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
 <head>
   <title></title>
 </head>
 <body>
    <script type="text/javascript">
         if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
             {// code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
                 xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
             }
         else
             {// code for IE6, IE5
                 xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
             }
         xmlhttp.open("GET","messages.xml",false);
         xmlhttp.send();
         xmlDoc=xmlhttp.responseXML;

         var x=xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("entry");
         for (i=0;i<x.length;i++)
             {
                 document.write("<b>From:</b> ");
                 document.write(x[i].getElementsByTagName("username")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue);
                 document.write("<br />");
                 document.write("<b>Date:</b> ");
                 document.write(x[i].getElementsByTagName("date")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue);
                 document.write("<br />");
                 document.write("<b>Message:</b> ");
                 document.write(x[i].getElementsByTagName("message")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue);
                 document.write("<br />");
                 document.write("<br />");

             }
     </script>

     <div>Hi</div>

</body>
</html>

And the test data from messages.xml also located at the root of my server

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
    <entry>
        <username>A</username>
        <date>B</date>
        <message>C</message>
    </entry>
</root>

This produces the following output

From: A
Date: B
Message: C

Hi

IE is a pain to debug because it has very limited debugging tools. I checked with FireFox's FireBug add-on to see that the content-type from my WAMP server was "application/xml".

content-type=application/xml

You should also make sure that your XML document is valid by running it through a validator.

I feel really stupid, at your mention of your WAMP server. I tried running it on my local server.... You guessed it - all working on IE now.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Unable to extract data from XML file using javascript in Internet Explorer

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related