XmlSearch() Ignores CDATA Sections In ColdFusion XPath

I ran into a really weird problem today. I was working on an event based XML parser (along the lines of the SAX parser, but way dumbbed down) and couldn't seem to get CDATA sections to be returned in my XPath. CDATA is an escape notation that ensure that a block of text is not parsed as if it were XML, but rather utilized as plain text. It is denoted using the following syntax:

<![CDATA[ ...your character data here... ]]>

CDATA text and standard node text values are supposed to be one and the same; they both result in node text and should not be distinguishable. And, if you try to CFDump out a ColdFusion XML document, you will see that that appears to be true. Let's create an XML document that has some CDATA text:

As you can see, the Name and Age nodes have standard, inline text while the Description node has CDATA text. When we CFDump out this ColdFusion XML document, we get the following:

When you CFDump out a ColdFusion XML document that has CDATA text, there is no distinction - all node text appears in the node XmlText attributes. This is how it should be as CDATA is just a notation, not a distinct type of node.

Now, let's try to grab all the text nodes that are grandchildren of the root Girl node:

This should grab the text nodes for Name, Age, and Description; however, when we CFDump out our array of nodes, we get the following:

Notice that the text values for Name and Age came through fine, but he CDATA text for the Description node was totally ignored. I am pretty sure this is a bug - everything that I have read has said that inline node text and CDATA node text should not be distinguished in any way.

As an experiment, I created a ColdFusion XML document that had a mixture of inline text and CDATA text under the same parent node:

Here, the girl Description node has intermingled text types. And, as documented, this creates a single text value when accessed directly via xmlData.girl.description.XmlText:

She is insanely hot. I swear, you'd have to see it to believe it, but you should just take my word for it. Pretty pretty pretty good.

However, when we use XPath to get the text node:

... we get the following CFDump output of our text nodes:

Here, something really weird happens - we only get the text node data up to the opening of the CDATA section. The rest of the text value, include the text that comes after the close CDATA section, is completely ignored.

I could be wrong, but this seems like a very serious bug to me. This can create all sorts of complications for building data import solutions in which you get XML from any sort of third party. Has anyone else experienced this problem and is there a way to get around it?

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