Jquery doesn't insert literally CDATA from XML inside html

Question

I've been searching for a similar question to avoid asking already solved questions, but I haven't found a valid answer for me, sorry if there's one and I haven't seen it. I'm reading an XML file from Jquery, the xml file has some CDATA stuff that I have purposely added and that I would like to preserve for formatting purposes:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<categories>
    <description name="whatever">
        Blah, blah, blah<![CDATA[<br />]]>blah, blah, blah
    </description>
</categories>

After reading it, I append it to a div:

$(xml).find('description[name="whatever"]').each(function()
{       
    $(container).append($(this));
});

What I've got is that Jquery seems to scape the '<' and '>' so I finally have:

Blah, blah, blah&l;tbr /&gt;blah, blah, blah

I have already tried to force the appending to treat the content as text like this:

$(container).text($(this));

But then I get:

[Object object]

And if I do .html() I get the same result as with the .append()...

ebohlman · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-01 01:09:23Z

2

Ordinary XML processors have no way of knowing whether anything they process came from a CDATA section; as far as they know, any CDATA content is just plain text. As such, when jQuery processes CDATA stuff, it isn't going to treat it any differently than stuff that appeared in a string literal (in fact, since jQuery is simply a layer over the DOM, it has absolutely no way of knowing whether its input came from a CDATA section or a string literal, since the DOM doesn't make any such distinction).

edited Mar 1, 2013 at 1:09

answered Feb 28, 2013 at 10:22

ebohlman

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1 Comment

user997593 Over a year ago

That's a good pill of knowledge full of sense, thank you for the info, then I should change my question on, how can I insert HTML inside an XML in order to be understood as HTML by Jquery?

user997593 · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-28 16:41:41Z

1

For the folks that may fall in the same hole in the future:

First of all, declare it as XML:

$.get("yourxml.xml", {}, function (data) 
{            

},'xml');

Afterwards, introduce it like text:

$(xml).find('description[name="whatever"]').each(function()
{       
    $(container).append($(this).text());
});

This is working for me like a charm!

answered Feb 28, 2013 at 16:41

user997593

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1 Comment

Álvaro González Over a year ago

If it's supposed to be HTML, you should be using .html()... :-?

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