XML - White space ?

Hi all

I have a simple xml file that I'm using to load images

        <travel&lifestyle>
		<image>images/travel/1marakesh</image>
		<image>images/travel/2marakesh</image>
		<image>images/travel/3marakesh</image>
		<image>images/travel/4marakesh</image>
		<image>images/travel/5new york</image>
	</travel&lifestyle>

I'm using the name of the base tag as the name of the nav to load the images. So from the xml above the nav button would be

"travel & lifestyle"

I know flash removes the whitespace but what if I want whitespace there.

If I try

<travel & lifestyle>

The xml won't load and I get an error loading the xml file into Firefox

"XML Parsing Error: not well-formed"

How can I format the xml to keep the space

Thanks in advance for any help

[tiran]

You can't use an ampersand in a node name I don't think. And there can definitely be no spaces in the node name. Consider this XML structure:

<imageSet>
<name><![CDATA[Travel & LifeStyle]]></name>
<images>
        <image>http://www.ultrashock.com/forums/images/travel/1marakesh</image>
        <image>http://www.ultrashock.com/forums/images/travel/2marakesh</image>
        <image>http://www.ultrashock.com/forums/images/travel/3marakesh</image>
        <image>http://www.ultrashock.com/forums/images/travel/4marakesh</image>
        <image>http://www.ultrashock.com/forums/images/travel/5newyork</image>
</images>
</imageSet> 

I used the CDATA tag because of the Ampersand in the title - Flash doesn't care a ton about that in this context, but its a good practice in nodes that might contain special chars or HTML.

This will allow you to query the XML based on the "name" nodes value in flash.

What version of AS are you using and I can elaborate.

[ttmt]

tiran

Thanks for your replay - I'm using AS3.

I've solved the problem by putting the name as an attribute of the node

[tiran]

Cool, I should also mention that putting something like "Travel & Lifestyle" in an attribute is technically still bad form because of the "&". There aren't supposed to be special characters in attributes - these days they can be escaped and Flash isn't as strict as say an RSS feed, so you will be ok for the most part.

Keep in mind this example though. Look what happens to the '&' in the attribute as opposed to the '&' in the CDATA

var xml:XML =new XML("<root><item name=\"Travel & Lifestyle\" ><name><![CDATA[Travel & LifeStyle]]></name></item><item name=\"New\" /></root>");
trace(xml); 

The trace looks like this:

<root>
  <item name="Travel &amp; Lifestyle">
    <name><![CDATA[Travel & LifeStyle]]></name>
  </item>
  <item name="New"/>
</root>