How to retrieve one level of xml only in a loop?

Question

I am processing this xml list:
<item>
     <sponsor></sponsor>
     <itemName></itemName>
     <img></img>
     <description></description>
</item>
<item>
     <sponsor></sponsor>
     <itemName></itemName>
     <img></img>
     <description></description>
     <links>
          <link>
               <thumb></thumb>
               <url></url>
               <caption></caption>
          </link>
          <link>
               <thumb></thumb>
               <url></url>
               <caption></caption>
          </link>
     </links>
</item>
As you can see, only some item nodes have a links node and its related subnodes. 
Originally, my application just had to loop through this collection and add all the "items" nodes to an array:
for each ( var x:XML in myXMLList ) {
     var arr:Array = [];
     for each ( var y:String in x.children()){
          arr.push(y);
     bigArray.push(arr);
Worked fine.  But now I've gotten the rewuirement to handle this potential sub-node "<links>", and now this entire node, tags and all, is getting pushed into "arr".  How would I prevent that, and instead process each "link" node as its own entry in a NEW array?
I am trying to prep this for JSON encoding, btw.  Ulimately I'm looking for:
[ [sponsor,itemname,img,description] , [sponsor,itemname,img,description, [ [link1thumb,link1url,link1caption], [link2thumb,link2url,link2caption]  ]  ]

Answer 1

Use for loop instead for each.
this is your code:
for each ( var x:XML in myXMLList ) {
     var arr:Array = [];
     for each ( var y:String in x.children()){
          arr.push(y);
     bigArray.push(arr);
Instead of above use this
var arr:Array = null;
for(var i:int=0; i< myXMLList.length(); i++){
            arr = new Array();
            if(myXMLList[i].name() != "links"){
             arr.push(myXMLList[i]);
i think it will help.