368167 - Iterating through an xml document: element.childNodes[0].firstChild has no properties.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 26179

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Andries Nieuwenhuize]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; nl; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; nl; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1

There seems to be a problem with the index 0. For example iterating through an xml document (element.childNodes[0].firstChild.nodeValue) won't work. It does well in IE7 and (element.childNodes[1].firstChild.nodeValue)works but different than it  is supposed to be. The childNode[0] does not exist in firefox2 and childNode[1] is seen as childNode[0]. The workaround that I currently use is (element.getElementsByTagName("tagname")[0]) instead of element.childNode[0] and this works well.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make an xml-doc with the followin structure:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<site>
 <page id="home">
  <title>Home</title>
  <content>Welcome to my site.</content>
 </page>
</site>
2. Try to catch the data when loaded:
var elDocRoot=xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("site")[0];
for (var i=0; i<elDocRoot.childNodes.length; i++) {
    elChild=elDocRoot.childNodes[i];
    if (elChild.nodeName=="page") {
     //title=elChild.getElementsByTagName("title")[0].firstChild.nodeValue; //workaround
     title=elChild.childNodes[0].firstChild.nodeValue;
     content=elChild.childNodes[1].firstChild.nodeValue;
     window.alert(title);
    }
   }
3.
Actual Results:  
Fout: elChild.childNodes[0].firstChild has no properties

elChild.childNodes[1].firstChild.nodeValue="Home";

Expected Results:  
elChild.childNodes[1].firstChild.nodeValue="Welcome to my site";

I think for AJAX-websites this could be a major bug!!!

Comment 1

[Andries Nieuwenhuize]

Attachment: test files to examen the problem

If jou run the index.html mind to set the proper docroot in buggy.js on line 6. After (or meanwhile) loading you can view the problem in the errorconsole.

Comment 2

[Neil Deakin]

element.childNodes[0] will return the whitespace between the tags.