MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX-USING DIRECTOR MX, Use Manual

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Using the XML Parser Xtra 549
Treating white space
The default behavior of the XML Parser Xtra is to ignore character data between XML tags when
all the characters are white space. This type of white space is usually due to Return characters and
superfluous space characters, but sometimes it can have meaning to the XML document.
You can use the
ignoreWhiteSpace()
function to change the way the Xtra treats white space. By
setting the
ignoreWhiteSpace()
to
FALSE
instead of its default value of
TRUE
, you can tell the
Xtra to treat instances of white space as literal data nodes. This way, white space between elements
is treated as actual data.
The following Lingo statements leave
ignoreWhiteSpace()
set to the default
TRUE
value, and
parse the given XML into a list. The
sample
element has no children in the list.
XMLtext = "<sample> </sample>"
parserObj.parseString(XMLtext)
theList = parserObj.makelist()
put theList
-- ["ROOT OF XML DOCUMENT": ["!ATTRIBUTES": [:], "sample": ["!ATTRIBUTES":
[:]]]]
The following Lingo statements set
ignoreWhiteSpace()
to
FALSE
, and parse the given XML
into a list. The
sample
element now has a child that contains one space character.
XMLtext = "<sample> </sample>"
parserObj.ignoreWhiteSpace(FALSE)
parserObj.parseString(XMLtext)
theList = parserObj.makelist()
put theList
-- ["ROOT OF XML DOCUMENT": ["!ATTRIBUTES": [:], "sample": ["!ATTRIBUTES":
[:], "!CHARDATA": " "]]]
If there are non-white space characters in a !CHARDATA node, all the characters of the node,
including leading and trailing white space characters, are retained.
XML and character sets
When you use XML, remember that different computer systems use different binary encoding to
represent text characters.
The XML Parser Xtra adheres strictly to the XML specification, which states that XML
documents are, by default, encoded using the UTF-8 character set. If the document is
not encoded in UTF-8, it must include a declaration of its character set in the first line of
the document.
The following XML declares the IOS-8859-1 character set, also known as Latin1:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
This requirement applies to documents parsed by
parseString()
as well as files that are parsed
by
parseURL()
.