XML: Apending Children

Question

Imagine the following XML:
<list>
<item> </item>
<item> </item>
</list>
Now in ActionScript, if I loop through all children and
attempt to add text nodes to each individual node like so
(pseudocode)
children = xml.children();
for (i = 0; i < children.length(); ++i)
children
.appendChild("test" + i);
What happens here is both nodes get updated twice. It looks
like the XML code appends the child to all nodes with the same
name. So now my XML looks like this:
<list>
<item>test1 test2</item>
<item>test1 test2</item>
</list>
What I'm looking to do is this:
<list>
<item>test1</item>
<item>test2</item>
</list>
Can this be done or is the XML code in ActionScript
borked?

Answer 1

Hmm, I see now that rather than manage multiple xml nodes,
flex prefers to group similar nodes into a single array.I'm not
particularly fond of this as it goes against how I work with XML in
other languages and platforms, but I can live with it for now.
As a workaround, I'm removing duplicate nodes and instead
appending children to the same children over and over again. So the
result now looks like this:
<list>
<item>
item1
item2
item3
</item>
</list>
In action script, I have to do the following to access those
text nodes:
list.item.getChildren()[index];
I guess this isn't to bad. Had it worked my way, the only
difference would have been:
list.item[index]
So there's an extra step involved. Perhaps I'll just write a
wrapper that will do this for me.
If anyone wants to share their comments on this, please do.
Meanwhile I'm going to label this topic answered.