Inside XML

Parsing XML Documents in Code

Up to this point, I've gone after a specific element in a Web page, but there are other ways of handling documents, too. For example, you can parse—that is, read and interpret—the entire document at once. Here's an example; in this case, I'll work through this entire XML document, meetings.xml, displaying all its nodes in an HTML Web page.

To handle this document, I'll create a function, iterateChildren, that will read and display all the children of a node. As with most parsers, this function is a recursive function, which means that it can call itself to get the children of the current node. To get the name of a node, I will use the nodeName property. To parse an entire document, then, you just have to pass the ...