Working with mixed-content XML

Question

Am new to Flex 2 and AS 3 but well versed in XML and related
technologies. This is my first time posting to the forum.
I have a simple Flex application that loads an external XML
file via HTTPService and binds the XML to some MXML form controls.
This works well as long as the XML element contains simple text,
but breaks when the element contains a mixture of text and other
elements (e.g. mixed-content).
<something>some text</something> (Fine)
<something>some <b>bold</b>
text</something> (Breaks).
Just wondering if anyone has could point me to an example of
a Flex application interpreting mixed content XML. I've looked at
various forums and in books and there isn't a lot on the subject
from what I can see. Most of the XML examples I've found use flat,
database/table-style XML which don't suit my purposes.
Thanks
Heather

Answer 1

Let's not give up here. The problem is that you have HTML
inside of an XML structure and the HTML, because its syntax is just
like XML, cannot be distinguished by the XML parser. The proper way
to get your HTML embedded in the XML is to use CDATA. So whoever
created the XML didn't take that into account.
I gave this a bit more thought. This will work ONLY if the
HTML inside of the XML is always complete. No <br> tags
without a </br>; no <p> without </p> etc. as that
won't be readable by the XML parser.
Once you've got your XML structure in Flex, you can get all
of the <something> items like this:
var somethings:XMLList = xmlvar.something;
Now you have an XMLList - an Array of XML structures. This
means somethings[0] is "some text" but somethings[1] is an XML node
with a sub-structure which includes the <b> node. I hope you
are withme so far.
Now try this: var sometext:String = XML( somethings[1]
).toString();
The toString() method should flatten the contents back into a
string and you can assign that to the htmlText property of the
control.
As I said, your XML has to be perfect for this to work. Or
you have to convince the author(s) of the XML to use CDATA to
enclose the HTML.