XMLSerializer

The XMLSerializer interface provides the serializeToString() method to construct an XML string representing a DOM tree.

Methods

serializeToString()

Returns the serialized subtree of a string.

serializeToStream()

The subtree rooted by the specified element is serialized to a byte stream using the character set specified.

Examples

Serializing XML into a string

The first, basic, example just serializes an entire document into a string containing XML.

 var s = new XMLSerializer();
 var d = document;
 var str = s.serializeToString(d);
 saveXML(str);

This involves creating a new XMLSerializer object, then passing the Document to be serialized into serializeToString(), which returns the XML equivalent of the document.

Inserting nodes into a DOM based on XML

This example uses the Element.insertAdjacentHTML() method to insert a new DOM Node into the body of the Document, based on XML created by serializing an Element object.

Because insertAdjacentHTML() accepts a string and not a Node as its second parameter, XMLSerializer is used to first convert the node into a string.

var inp = document.createElement('input');
var XMLS = new XMLSerializer();
var inp_xmls = XMLS.serializeToString(inp); // First convert DOM node into a string

// Insert the newly created node into the document's body
document.body.insertAdjacentHTML('afterbegin', inp_xmls);

The code creates a new <input> element by calling Document.createElement(), then serializes it into XML using serializeToString().

Once that's done, insertAdjacentHTML() is used to insert the <input> element into the DOM.

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• Parsing and serializing XML
• XMLHttpRequest
• DOMParser