A substitute for doc.evaluate - javascript

Is there any shorter expression to get DOM nods via XPath, more concise from following command that need a lot of variables.
doc.evaluate(xpath, doc, nsResolver, XPathResult.ANY_TYPE, null);

As far as I know Firefox only supports the DOM Level 3 XPath API, part of which the evaluate function is. If you want something shorter then you need to roll your own (or find a library which does it for you) or you need to use a different browser, for instance with Opera you can do e.g. node.selectSingleNode(path [,nsResolver]) to select a single node, with node.selectNodes(path [, nsResolver]) you can select a DOM NodeList of nodes. Within MSXML's XML DOM implementation you use with IE you also have selectSingleNode and selectNodes function although namespace handing there is different from the Opera implementation as with MSXML you need to use document.setProperty('SelectionNamespaces', 'xmlns:pf1="http://example.com/ns1" xmlns:pf2="http://example.com/ns2"').

Related

document.getElementsByName("") equivalent in YUI3.0

AS we know that to get value of an element by ID in YUI3.0 we use below code.
Y.one("#element_id");
Is there any equivalent code in YUI 3.0 for document.getElementsByName("element_name"); of javascript.
You can use any CSS selector, such as the attribute selector.
var all_element_names = Y.all('[name="element_name"]');
Also, keep in mind, if the browser supports the native getElementsByName() method, YUI will use it. But if the browser does not support the native method, YUI will brute force the DOM to find the attribute, with a performance penalty.

Parsing XML in a Web Worker

I have been using a DOMParser object to parse a text string to an XML tree. However it is not available in the context of a Web Worker (and neither is, of course, document.ELEMENT_NODE or the various other constants that would be needed). Is there any other way to do that?
Please note that I do not want to manipulate the DOM of the current page. The XML file won't contain HTML elements or anything of the sort. In fact, I do not want to touch the document object at all. I simply want to provide a text string like the following:
<car color="blue"><driver/></car>
...and get back a suitable tree structure and a way to traverse it. I also do not care about schema validation or anything fancy. I know about XML for <SCRIPT>, which many may find useful (hence I'm linking to it here), however its licensing is not really suitable for me. I'm not sure if jQuery includes an XML parser (I'm fairly new to this stuff), but even if it does (and it is usable inside a Worker), I would not include an extra ~50K lines of code just for this function.
I suppose I could write a simple XML parser in JavaScript, I'm just wondering if I'm missing a quicker option.
according to the spec
The DOM APIs (Node objects, Document objects, etc) are not available to workers in this version of this specification.
I guess thats why DOMParser is not availlable, but I don't really understand why that decision was made. (fetching and processing an XML document in a WebWorker does not seems unreasonnable)
but you can import other tools available: a "Cross Platform XML Parsing in JavaScript"
At this point I like to share my parser: https://github.com/tobiasnickel/tXml
with its tXml() method you can parse a string into an object and it takes only 0.5kb minified + gzipped

Using exslt extentions be used in javascript xpaths

I would like to use javascript XPaths in a web app using exslt extensions, but I can't figure out how to do this.
Pretend I've got an html doc with some divs in it. I want to run this:
namespaces={'regexp':'http://exslt.org/regular-expressions'};
result = document.evaluate(
"//div[regexp:test(.,'$')]",
document,
function(ns){
return namespaces.hasOwnProperty(ns) ? namespaces[ns] : null;
},
XPathResult.ANY_TYPE,
null);
Only that results in an invalid XPath expression exception in evaluate. I'm using chrome.
Is there anything else I need to do to make this stuff work? I see on exslt.org that there are implementations for javascript, but how do I make sure those are available? Do I need to insert my javascript into a namespaced script element in the dom or something insane?
UPDATE
If this isn't possible directly using browser dom + javascript and xpath, would it be possible to write XSLT using exslt extensions in the browser to simulate document.evaluate (returning a list of elements that match the xpath)?
I don't think the default browser XPath implementation supports EXSLT. The javascript support mentioned on the EXSLT page is likely about how you can provide your own implementation of the exslt function using in-browser.javascript. Here's one example I was able to find very quickly.
In Firefox, for example, you can have Saxon-B as an extension to run XSLT2.0 and Saxon-B has built-in support for exslt (unlike Saxon-HE), though you will likely be better off just using XSLT/XPath 2.0 features. Here's the regular expression syntax, for example. That said, however, relying on a Mozilla Saxon-B extension isn't something that will help you with Chrome or other browsers for that matter.
With that said I don't think you can find a cross-browser solution to use EXSLT extensions in your XPath. The conformance section of the DOM Level 3 XPath calls for XPath 1.0 support and doesn't mention EXSLT. The INVALID_EXPRESSION_ERR is said to be thrown:
if the expression has a syntax error or otherwise is not a legal expression according to the rules of the specific XPathEvaluator or contains specialized extension functions or variables not supported by this implementation.
Finally, here's an open bugzilla ticket for Firefox to open up EXSLT support for their DOM Level 3 XPath implementation. It seems to be sitting there in NEW status since 2007. The ticket says that:
Currently Mozilla gives an exception "The expression is not a legal expression." even if a namespace resolver correctly resolving the EXSLT prefixes to the corresponding URLs is passed in. Here's the test case.
--
If you don't mind me asking, what exactly you wanted to use the regex for? Maybe we can help you get away with a combination of standard XPath string functions?
--
UPDATE You can build an XPath runner via XSLT (like you're asking in the update to your question) but it won't return the nodes from the source document, it will return new nodes that look exactly the same. XSLT produces a new result tree document and I don't think there's a way to let it return references to the original nodes.
As far as I can tell, Mozilla (and Chrome) both support XSLT not only for XML documents loaded from external sources, but also for DOM elements from the document being displayed. The XSLTProcessor documentation mentions how tranformToFragment(), for example, will only produce HTML DOM objects if the owner document is itself an HTMLDocument, or if the output method of the stylesheet is HTML.
Here's a simple XPath Runner that I built testing out your ides:
1) First you would need an XSLT template to work with.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:regexp="http://exslt.org/regular-expressions"
extension-element-prefixes="regexp">
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:copy-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
I started building it in the JavaScript using the document.implementation.createDocument APi but figured it would be easier to just load it. FF still supports document.load while Chrome only lets you load stuff using XHR. You would need to start your Chrome with --allow-file-access-from-files if you want to load files with XHR from your local disk.
2) Once we have the template loaded we would need to modify the value of the select attribute of the xsl:copy-of instruction to run the XPath we need:
function runXPath(xpath) {
var processor = new XSLTProcessor();
var xsltns = 'http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform';
var xmlhttp = new window.XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.open("GET", "xpathrunner.xslt", false);
xmlhttp.send(null);
var transform = xmlhttp.responseXML.documentElement;
var copyof = transform.getElementsByTagNameNS(xsltns, 'copy-of')[0];
copyof.setAttribute('select', xpath);
processor.importStylesheet(transform);
var body = document.getElementById('body'); // I gave my <body> an id attribute
return processor.transformToFragment(body, document);
}
You can now run it with something like:
var nodes = runXPath('//div[#id]');
console.log(nodes.hasChildNodes());
if (nodes.firstChild) {
console.log(nodes.firstChild.localName);
}
It works great for "regular" XPath like that //div[#id] (and fails to find //div[#not-there]) but I just can't get it to run the regexp:test extension function. With the //div[regexp:test(string(#id), "a")] it doesn't error out, just returns empty set.
Mozilla documentation suggests their XSLT processor support EXSLT. I would imagine they are all using libxml/libxslt behind the scenes anyway. That said, I couldn't get it to work in Mozilla either.
Hope it helps.
Any chance you can get away with jQuery regexp? not likely to be helpful for your XPath builder utility but still a way to run regexp on HTML nodes.

Where does HTML DOM start? window? document? document.defaultView?

As the title.
And is there a picture which introduces HTML DOM's construct?
The DOM (Document Object Model) begins at the document node. It is referred to as the "root node".
Observe the following tree (corresponding nodeTypes in parentheses):
[HTMLDocument](9)
[DocumentType](10)
[HTMLHTMLElement](1)
[HTMLHeadElement](1)
[HTMLTitleElement](1)
[Text]Title(3)
[HTMLBodyElement](1)
The tree¹ would be formed from the following markup:
<!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head><title>Title</title></head></body></html>
Note the distinct lack of whitespace. Adding whitespace would add text nodes to the document tree and clearly make it more difficult to simulate.
The window object is not part of the DOM. It is a host object implemented as the "global object" to complete an ECMAScript implementation. It has its own standard which is available from the W3C. Whereas the global object is required to complete an ECMAScript implementation, the DOM is not. This is exemplified in the node.js environment.
¹ Certain environments ignore the doctype node. I've observed Opera 5-9 and Safari 3.1 as environments that exhibit this behaviour.
There is no public standard for window, but most browsers support it with Window at the root.
I've found a lot of good stuff at: http://www.w3schools.com (I have no connection with the site).
A simple google search for "dom html" images will get you images. Then...
When all else fails - go to the source: http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-HTML/html.html

A library in JavaScript for XML parsing with namespaces?

I have a handful of code that uses the DOM to parse and traverse some XML data. It works fine on Gecko and WebKit but, of course, IE absolutely chokes on it. Is there a library for an XML DOM that supports:
getAttributeNS
localName
namespaceURI
Support for IE7 is about as far back as I need to go.
You can use jQuery to safely and easily parse XML in Internet Explorer. This tutorial Easy XML Consumption using jQuery will give you a more in-depth information on how you can do it.
Not sure if you want to go this route, but this can be done with MSXML using their nonstandard way of doing things. MSXML 3.0 comes with IE 6 and later.
I haven't actually done this ;-) but this might be what you need:
IXMLDOMNamedNodeMap.getQualifiedItem looks like getAttributeNS
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms757075.aspx
IXMLDOMNode has a namespaceURI property.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms763813.aspx
IXMLDOMNode.baseName looks like localName
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms767570.aspx

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