ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

XML.nodeValue Property

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Alphabetical Language Reference

|

937

Technically, ActionScript implements so-called attribute, document, and document_type

nodes in addition to element and text nodes, but we don’t have direct access to them as

objects. For example, we can manipulate the attributes of a node through the

attributes

property, but we do not have direct access to attribute nodes themselves. Similarly, we have

access to the

DOCTYPE tag of a document through the docTypeDecl property, but we do not

have direct access to the document_type node itself.

Element nodes correspond to XML or HTML tags. For example, in the XML fragment

<P>what is your favorite color?</P>, the P tag is represented in an XML object hierarchy

as an element node (

nodeType 1). The text contained by a tag in XML source code—for

example, the text “what is your favorite color?”—is represented as a text node (

nodeType 3).

CDATA section nodes are irreversibly converted to text nodes when they are parsed, as

described under XML.parseXML().

Example

We can operate on a node conditionally, based on its nodeType. For example, here we

remove all the empty text nodes that are children of

theNode:

// Loop through all children of theNode

for (var i=0; i < theNode.childNodes.length; i++) {

// If the current node is a text node...

if (theNode.childNodes[i].nodeType ...