How to use jQuery for XML parsing with namespaces

Brian Liang picture Brian Liang · May 12, 2009 · Viewed 65.2k times · Source

I'm new to jQuery and would like to parse an XML document.

I'm able to parse regular XML with the default namespaces but with XML such as:

<xml xmlns:s="uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" xmlns:rs="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset" xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema">
   <s:Schema id="RowsetSchema">
     <s:ElementType name="row" content="eltOnly" rs:CommandTimeout="30">
       <s:AttributeType name="ows_ID" rs:name="ID" rs:number="1">
        <s:datatype dt:type="i4" dt:maxLength="4" />
      </s:AttributeType>
       <s:AttributeType name="ows_DocIcon" rs:name="Type" rs:number="2">
        <s:datatype dt:type="string" dt:maxLength="512" />
      </s:AttributeType>
       <s:AttributeType name="ows_LinkTitle" rs:name="Title" rs:number="3">
        <s:datatype dt:type="string" dt:maxLength="512" />
      </s:AttributeType>
       <s:AttributeType name="ows_ServiceCategory" rs:name="Service Category" rs:number="4">
        <s:datatype dt:type="string" dt:maxLength="512" />
      </s:AttributeType>
    </s:ElementType>
  </s:Schema>
   <rs:data>
    <z:row ows_ID="2" ows_LinkTitle="Sample Data 1" />
    <z:row ows_ID="3" ows_LinkTitle="Sample Data 2" />
    <z:row ows_ID="4" ows_LinkTitle="Sample Data 3" />
  </rs:data>
</xml>

All I really want are the <z:row>.

So far, I've been using:

$.get(xmlPath, {}, function(xml) {
    $("rs:data", xml).find("z:row").each(function(i) {
        alert("found zrow");
    });
}, "xml");

with really no luck. Any ideas?

Answer

Brian Liang picture Brian Liang · May 13, 2009

I got it.

Turns out that it requires \\ to escape the colon.

$.get(xmlPath, {}, function(xml) {
    $("rs\\:data", xml).find("z\\:row").each(function(i) {
        alert("found zrow");
    });
}, "xml");

As Rich pointed out:

The better solution does not require escaping and works on all "modern" browsers:

.find("[nodeName=z:row]")