xmldoc lets you parse XML documents with ease. It's a lightweight XML document class with a single dependency on the excellent sax parser.
For more on why I wrote this class, see the blog post.
As of version 2.0, xmldoc fully supports TypeScript and can be imported in both CommonJS and ESM environments.
See CHANGELOG.md for details.
npm install xmldoc # or yarn add xmldoc
Or just download the repository and include it in your node_modules directly. Or just download the single JS file!
const { XmlDocument } = require("xmldoc");
const document = new XmlDocument("<some>xml</some>");
// do things
// ESM environments
import { XmlDocument } from "xmldoc";
const document = new XmlDocument("<some>xml</some>");
If you're using React Native, you may need to install buffer and stream separately:
npm install buffer stream xmldoc
The primary exported class is XmlDocument, which you'll use to consume your XML text. XmlDocument contains a hierarchy of XmlElement instances representing the XML structure.
Both XmlElement and XmlDocument contain the same members and methods you can call to traverse the document or a subtree.
name Node name, like "tat" for <tat>. XML "namespaces" are ignored by the underlying sax-js parser: so <office:body> becomes "office:body". attr {} Object dict containing attribute properties. Like bookNode.attr.title for <book title="...">. val "" String "value" of the node, if any. Like "world" for <hello>world</hello>. children [] Array of XmlElement children of the node. firstChild What it sounds like. null if no children. lastChild What it sounds like. null if no children. line, column, position, startTagPosition Information about the element's original position in the XML string.
All methods with child in the name operate only on direct children; they do not do a deep/recursive search.
It's important to note that xmldoc is designed for when you know exactly what you want from your XML file. For instance, it's great for parsing API responses with known structures, but it's not great at teasing things out of HTML documents from the web.
If you need to do lots of searching through your XML document, I highly recommend trying a different library like node-elementtree.
Similar to underscore's each method, it will call func(child, index, array) for each child of the given node.
Pass it the name of a child node and it will search for and return the first one found, or undefined.
Like childNamed but returns all matching children in an array, or [].
Searches for the first child with the given attribute value. You can omit value to just find the first node with the given attribute defined at all.
Searches for a specific "path" using dot notation. Example:
<book>
<author>
<name isProper="true">George R. R. Martin</name>
...
</author>
...
</book>
If you just want the <name> node and you have the XmlElement for the <book> node, you can say:
var nameNode = bookNode.descendantWithPath("author.name"); // return <name> node
Just like descendantWithPath, but goes deeper and extracts the val of the node. Example:
var authorName = bookNode.valueWithPath("author.name"); // return "George R. R. Martin"
You can also use the @ character to request the value of a particular attribute instead:
var authorIsProper = bookNode.valueWithPath("author.name@isProper"); // return "true"
This is not XPath! It's just a thing I made up, OK?
This is just an override of the standard JavaScript method, it will give you a string representation of your XML document or element. Note that this is for debugging only! It is not guaranteed to always output valid XML.
The default implementation of toString(), that is, the one you get when you just console.log("Doc: " + myDoc) will pretty-print the XML with linebreaks and indents. You can pass a couple options to control the output:
xml.toString({ compressed: true }); // strips indents and linebreaks
xml.toString({ trimmed: true }); // trims long strings for easier debugging
xml.toString({ preserveWhitespace: true }); // prevents whitespace from being removed from around element values
xml.toString({ html: true }); // uses HTML self-closing tag rules for elements without children
Putting it all together:
var xml = "<author><name>looooooong value</name></author>";
console.log(
"My document: \n" + new XmlDocument(xml).toString({ trimmed: true }),
);
Prints:
My Document:
<hello>
loooooooo…
</hello>
Feel free to file issues or hit me up on X.
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