Disclaimer: The following answer assumes that you are using the JavaScript environment of a web browser.
JavaScript handles XML with 'XML DOM objects'.
You can obtain such an object in three ways:
1. Creating a new XML DOM object
var xmlDoc = document.implementation.createDocument(null, "books");
The first argument can contain the namespace URI of the document to be created, if the document belongs to one.
Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DOMImplementation/createDocument
2. Fetching an XML file with XMLHttpRequest
var xhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (xhttp.readyState == 4 && xhttp.status == 200) {
var xmlDoc = xhttp.responseXML; //important to use responseXML here
}
xhttp.open("GET", "books.xml", true);
xhttp.send();
3. Parsing a string containing serialized XML
var xmlString = "<root></root>";
var parser = new DOMParser();
var xmlDoc = parser.parseFromString(xmlString, "text/xml"); //important to use "text/xml"
When you have obtained an XML DOM object, you can use methods to manipulate it like
var node = xmlDoc.createElement("heyHo");
var elements = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("root");
elements[0].appendChild(node);
For a full reference, see http://www.w3schools.com/xml/dom_intro.asp
Note:
It is important, that you don't use the methods provided by the document namespace, i. e.
var node = document.createElement("Item");
This will create HTML nodes instead of XML nodes and will result in a node with lower-case tag names. XML tag names are case-sensitive in contrast to HTML tag names.
You can serialize XML DOM objects like this:
var serializer = new XMLSerializer();
var xmlString = serializer.serializeToString(xmlDoc);
