ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Working with XML
If an element contains no content, it can be written as an empty element (sometimes called a self-closing element). In
XML, this element:
is identical to this element:
In addition to the element’s content contained between the opening and closing tags, an element can also include other
values, known as attributes, defined in the element’s opening tag. For example, this XML element defines a single
attribute named length, with the value "4:19" :
Each XML element has content, which is either a single value, one or more XML elements, or nothing (for an empty
element).
Learning more about XML
To learn more about working with XML, there are a number of additional books and resources for learning more about
XML, including these web sites:
W3Schools XML Tutorial: http://w3schools.com/xml/
XMLpitstop tutorials, discussion lists, and more: http://xmlpitstop.com/
ActionScript classes for working with XML
ActionScript 3.0 includes several classes that are used for working with XML-structured information. The two main
classes are as follows:
XML: Represents a single XML element, which can be an XML document with multiple children or a single-value
element within a document.
XMLList: Represents a set of XML elements. An XMLList object is used when there are multiple XML elements that
are “siblings” (at the same level, and contained by the same parent, in the XML document’s hierarchy). For instance,
an XMLList instance would be the easiest way to work with this set of XML elements (presumably contained in an
XML document):
Fred Wilson
James Schmidt
Susan Harriet Thurndon
For more advanced uses involving XML namespaces, ActionScript also includes the Namespace and QName classes.
For more information, see “Using XML namespaces” on page 110.
In addition to the built-in classes for working with XML, ActionScript 3.0 also includes several operators that provide
specific functionality for accessing and manipulating XML data. This approach to working with XML using these
classes and operators is known as ECMAScript for XML (E4X), as defined by the ECMA-357 edition 2 specification.
Important concepts and terms
The following reference list contains important terms you will encounter when programming XML handling routines:
Element A single item in an XML document, identified as the content contained between a starting tag and an ending
tag (including the tags). XML elements can contain text data or other elements, or can be empty.
Empty element An XML element that contains no child elements. Empty elements are often written as self-closing
tags (such as ).
Last updated 6/6/2012
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