Flash 8 has delivered the ability to do simple searches for node names and attribute values in an XML file with its new XPathAPI class. Kris Hadlock shows how to use the XPathAPI in Flash 8 to simplify and give power to your XML parsing.
XML has bridged the gap between technologies and added a lot of power to Flash, allowing it to be more dynamic and flexible for building large applications. XML in Flash has been a possibility since Flash 5 with ActionScript 1, and significantly improved when it became a native object in Flash Player 6 with the introduction of ActionScript 2. But along with all of this power came certain limitations that don’t exist in more complete programming languages. One huge difference was that there had been no implementation of the XPath in Flash, but this situation finally changed with the release of Flash 8. The native XPathAPI object in Flash 8 provides the capabilities to do simple searches for node names and attribute values in an XML file.
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