XML DOM firstChild Property
Complete Element Object Reference
Definition and Usage
The lastChild property returns the last child node of the selected
element
If the selected node has no children, this property returns NULL.
Syntax
Tips and Notes
Note: Firefox, and most other browsers, will treat empty white-spaces
or new lines as text nodes, Internet Explorer will not. So, in the example
below, we have a function that checks
the node type of the last child node.
Element nodes has a nodeType of 1, so if the last child node is not an
element node, it moves to the previous node, and checks if this node is an
element node. This continues until the last child node (which must be an element
node) is found. This way, the result will be correct in all browsers.
Tip: To read more about the differences between browsers, visit our
DOM Browsers chapter in our XML DOM
Tutorial.
Example
The following code fragment loads "books.xml"
into xmlDoc using
loadXMLDoc() and gets the last child node:
Example
//check if the last node is an element node
function get_lastchild(n)
{
x=n.lastChild;
while (x.nodeType!=1)
{
x=x.previousSibling;
}
return x;
}
xmlDoc=loadXMLDoc("books.xml");
x=xmlDoc.documentElement;
lastNode=get_lastchild(x);
for (i=0;i<lastNode.childNodes.length;i++)
{
if (lastNode.childNodes[i].nodeType==1)
{
//Process only element nodes
document.write(lastNode.childNodes[i].nodeName);
document.write(" = ");
document.write(lastNode.childNodes[i].childNodes[0].nodeValue);
document.write("<br />");
}
}
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The output of the code above will be:
title = Learning XML
author = Erik T. Ray
year = 2003
price = 39.95
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Try it yourself »
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Complete Element Object Reference

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