Load HTML from XML source – Part I

UPDATE:
I managed to forget TextField.condenseWhite = true!

We often, pull our dynamic content into Flash via XML. A Lot. As in pretty much exclusively. Sometimes, we’ll have honest-to-goodness information architecture to carve up that data semantically. We end up with a structured tree of simple text nodes. The XML parsing routine figures out how to turn this into a view. Great for all kinds of reasons. But sometimes, we just want to treat a node as a block of HTML and pass it into the htmlText property of a TextField.

This is unnecessarily hard. Neither XML.toString() nor XML.toXMLString() do what you want for this case. But the following function will:

private function getHTMLContent (xmlString:String):String
{
  var html = ""
  var prettyPrint = XML.prettyPrinting
  XML.prettyPrinting = false
  var ignoreWhite = XML.ignoreWhitespace
  XML.ignoreWhitespace = true

  var xml:XML = new XML (xmlString)
  var children = xml.children()

  if (children.length())
  {
    for each (var i in children)
    {
      html += i.toXMLString()
    }
  }
  else
  {
    html += xml
  }

  XML.prettyPrinting = prettyPrint
  XML.ignoreWhitespace = ignoreWhite

  return html
}


To use it, pass the XML node containing the HTML, and the function will return the appropriate HTML String. Let’s say your XML looks like:

<services>
<description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.<br /><br />Aliquam in lectus quis nisl lacinia dignissim.
<ul>
  <li>Proin viverra.</li>
  <li>Phasellus tristique.</li>
</ul>
</description>
</services>


Then, after loading the XML document, you’d do something like:

var desc = getHTMLContent(myXML.description)
content_tf.condenseWhite = true
content_tf.htmlText = desc


If you skip this step, you’ll end up including the description node (which isn’t what you want) or mangling the mixed-content nature (omitting the br tags or the parent-less “Lorem ipsum” opening sentence or something equally as wrong). The script should also works if your content is a straight-forward text node.

The prettyPrint and ignoreWhitespace stuff keeps your whitespace from wreaking havok with Flash’s HTML format (which is different from a browser in that it’ll happily add extra newlines when they appear in the source).

Next time, I’ll incorporate Rob’s entity decoding script since Flash’s built-in entity support is pretty lacking.