Getting The String Representation Of One ColdFusion XML Node : Kinky Solutions : A Student's Perspective by Ben Nadel

Getting The String Representation Of One ColdFusion XML Node

Posted September 20, 2007 at 3:27 PM

I can't remember how this came up, but the other day I was talking to this girl about XML; it was a pretty engaging conversation, as you can probably well imagine. I was trying to explain the difference between a ColdFusion XML document object and an XML string when the question occurred to me - can you use ToString() to get a partial representation of an XML document object.

Traditionally, you can call ToString() on an entire ColdFusion XML document to get an XML string representation:

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#ToString( xmlDocumentObject )#

But, what about calling that on an individual XML node that is within the XML document. I gave it a go:

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<cfxml variable="xmlGirls">
<girls>
<girl>
<name>Samantha</name>
<age>27</age>
<hair>Blonde</hair>
</girl>
<girl>
<name>Kim</name>
<age>32</age>
<hair>Brunette</hair>
</girl>
<girl>
<name>Cindi</name>
<age>25</age>
<hair>Black</hair>
</girl>
</girls>
</cfxml>
<cfset arrNodes = XmlSearch( xmlGirls, "//girl[ 3 ]" ) />
<cfset xmlGirl = arrNodes[ 1 ] />
<!---
Output the string representation of JUST this node
taken from the XML document.
--->
#HtmlEditFormat(
ToString( xmlGirl )
)#

As you can see, we are calling ColdFusion's ToString() method on only the third girl element node in the XML document. Running this gives us the following output:

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