Trying to use the DOMParser with node js

javascript xml node.js
Stephen D picture Stephen D · Jul 9, 2012 · Viewed 99.3k times · Source

I am running into issues when trying to use the DOMParser in my js code. In my code, I retrieve an xml file via xmlhttp.responseText soap response. I want to be able to access its elements in JSON format, so my code looks like:

var xml = new DOMParser();
xml = xml.parseFromString(xmlhttp.responseText, 'text/xml');
var result = xmlToJson(xml);

I get this error message: ReferenceError: DOMParser is not defined

Edit: This link hasn't worked for me because my javascript isn't in the HTML page, as it is a node.js file. JavaScript DOMParser access innerHTML and other properties

Answer

Nino Filiu picture Nino Filiu · Apr 13, 2019

A lot of browser functionalities, like DOM manipulations or XHR, are not available natively NodeJS because that is not a typical server task to access the DOM - you'll have to use an external library to do that.

DOM capacities depends a lot on the library, here's a quick comparisons of the main tools you can use:

  • jsdom: implements DOM level 4 which is the latest DOM standard, so everything that you can do on a modern browser, you can do it in jsdom. It is the de-facto industry standard for doing browser stuff on Node, used by Mocha, Vue Test Utils, Webpack Prerender SPA Plugin, and many other:

    const jsdom = require("jsdom");
const dom = new jsdom.JSDOM(`<!DOCTYPE html><p>Hello world</p>`);
dom.window.document.querySelector("p").textContent; // 'Hello world'

  • deno_dom: if using Deno instead of Node is an option, this library provides DOM parsing capabilities:

    import { DOMParser } from "https://deno.land/x/deno_dom/deno-dom-wasm.ts";
const parser = new DOMParser();
const document = parser.parseFromString('<p>Hello world</p>', 'text/html');
document.querySelector('p').textContent; // 'Hello world';

  • htmlparser2: same as jsdom, but with enhanced performances and flexibility at the price of a more complex API:

    const htmlparser = require("htmlparser2");
const parser = new htmlparser.Parser({
  onopentag: (name, attrib) => {
    if (name=='p') console.log('a paragraph element is opening');
  }
}, {decodeEntities: true});
parser.write(`<!DOCTYPE html><p>Hello world</p>`);
parser.end();
// console output: 'a paragraph element is opening'

  • cheerio: implementation of jQuery based on HTML DOM parsing by htmlparser2:

    const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const $ = cheerio.load(`<!DOCTYPE html><p>Hello world</p>`);
$('p').text('Bye moon');
$.html(); // '<!DOCTYPE html><p>Bye moon</p>'

  • xmldom: fully implements the DOM level 2 and partially implements the DOM level 3. Works with HTML, and with XML also

  • dom-parser: regex-based DOM parser that implements a few DOM methods like getElementById. Since parsing HTML with regular expressions is a very bad idea I wouldn't recommend this one for production.

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