jQuery won't parse xml with nodes called option

Question

I\'m using jQuery to parse some XML, like so:

function enumOptions(xml) {
   $(xml).find(\"animal\").each(function(){  
       alert($(this).text());
   });
         


        

Answer 1

Update

jQuery has this method built-in now. You can use

$.parseXML("..")

to construct the XML DOM from a string.

---

jQuery relies on the HTML DOM using innerHTML to parse the document which can have unreliable results when tag names collide with those in HTML.

Instead, you can use a proper XML parser to first parse the document, and then use jQuery for querying. The method below will parse a valid XML document in a cross-browser fashion:

// http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_parser.asp
function parseXML(text) {
    var doc;

    if(window.DOMParser) {
        var parser = new DOMParser();
        doc = parser.parseFromString(text, "text/xml");
    }
    else if(window.ActiveXObject) {
        doc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
        doc.async = "false";
        doc.loadXML(text);
    }
    else {
        throw new Error("Cannot parse XML");
    }

    return doc;
}

Once the XML DOM is constructed, jQuery can be used as normal - http://jsfiddle.net/Rz7Uv/

var text = "cowsquirrel";
var xml = parseXML(text);
$(xml).find("option"); // selects cow, squirrel