ActionScript: The Definitive Guide

Name

XML.nodeType Property — the type of the current node

Availability

Flash 5

Synopsis

theNode.nodeType

Access

Read-only

Description

The nodeType is an integer property that returns theNode’s type. Since only two node types are supported by ActionScript—element nodes and text nodes—nodeName has only two possible values: 1, if the node is an element node; and 3, if the node is a text node. These values may seem arbitrary, but they are actually the appropriate values as stipulated by the DOM. For reference, the other node types in the DOM are listed in Table 20.13.

Table 20-13. DOM Node Types

Node Description	Node Type Code
ELEMENT_NODE*	1
ATTRIBUTE_NODE	2
TEXT_NODE*	3
CDATA_SECTION_NODE	4
ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE	5
ENTITY_NODE	6
PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE	7
COMMENT_NODE	8
DOCUMENT_NODE	9
DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE	10
DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE	11
NOTATION_NODE	12

*Supported by Flash. 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 may 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 document_type itself.

Element nodes correspond to XML or HTML tags. For example, in the XML fragment <P>what is ...