I am using cheerio in nodejs to parse some rss feeds. I am grabbing all the items putting them into an array. I am using 3 test feeds, all of them have a "description" child element for each "item" element. In one of the feeds the whole "description" is wrapped as CDATA, and I cant get its value. Here is an abbreviated code snippet

//Open the xml document with cheerio
$ = cheerio.load(arrXmlDocs[i],{ ignoreWhitespace : true, xmlMode : true});

//Loop through every item
$('item').each(function(i, xmlItem){

    //array to hold each item being converted into an array
    var tempArray = [];

    //Loop through each child of <item>
    $(xmlItem).children().each(function(i, xmlItem){
        //Get the name 
        tempArray[$(this)[0].name] = $(this).text();
    }

}

As expected the two rss feeds that dont have CDATA give me an array like this

[
    [
        name: 'name of episode',
        description:'description of episode',
        pubdate: 'published date'
    ],
    [
        name: 'name of episode',
        description:'description of episode',
        pubdate: 'published date'
    ]
]

and the feed with the CDATA description looks like this

    [
        name: 'name of episode',
        pubdate: 'published date'
    ],

So my question is: Why is cheerio not returning values wrapped in CDATA / how can I make it return those values.

I am using cheerio in nodejs to parse some rss feeds. I am grabbing all the items putting them into an array. I am using 3 test feeds, all of them have a "description" child element for each "item" element. In one of the feeds the whole "description" is wrapped as CDATA, and I cant get its value. Here is an abbreviated code snippet

//Open the xml document with cheerio
$ = cheerio.load(arrXmlDocs[i],{ ignoreWhitespace : true, xmlMode : true});

//Loop through every item
$('item').each(function(i, xmlItem){

    //array to hold each item being converted into an array
    var tempArray = [];

    //Loop through each child of <item>
    $(xmlItem).children().each(function(i, xmlItem){
        //Get the name 
        tempArray[$(this)[0].name] = $(this).text();
    }

}

As expected the two rss feeds that dont have CDATA give me an array like this

[
    [
        name: 'name of episode',
        description:'description of episode',
        pubdate: 'published date'
    ],
    [
        name: 'name of episode',
        description:'description of episode',
        pubdate: 'published date'
    ]
]

and the feed with the CDATA description looks like this

    [
        name: 'name of episode',
        pubdate: 'published date'
    ],

So my question is: Why is cheerio not returning values wrapped in CDATA / how can I make it return those values.

• javascript
• xml
• node.js
• cdata
• cheerio

• 1 Can you make it more clear exactly what you are asking here? – neelsg Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 8:28
• updated to more clearly ask the question. – PaulParton Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 8:50

1 Answer 1

This is a known issue (related) with cheerio. It is unable to create a correct tree out of XML with CDATA in your case yet. I know this is a disappointing answer, it's WIP.

It is being worked on, meanwhile, you can remove CDATA with a Regular Expression.

arrXmlDocs[i].replace(/<!\[CDATA\[([\s\S]*?)\]\]>(?=\s*<)/gi, "$1");

Here is a link to an example jsfiddle.

While this is not an ideal solution, it should suffice until they work this issue out.