XML filter with parent nodes intact

programming flash
1

Hi all.

Is there any obscure, standard E4X way of filtering XML so that the results are returned with the tree structure with all parents intact?

Similar to e.g. this:

var selectedNodes:XMLList = content..thumbnail;

But this returns only the matching nodes as a flat XMLList. I would like instead like to strip out all branches that don’t ultimately contain a thumbnail element, but maintain branch leading down to the matched node.

Like this:


<xml>
	<firstNode>
		<childNode></childNode>
		<childNode></childNode>
		<childNode></childNode>
	</firstNode>
	<secondNode>
		<unwantedChild></unwantedChild>
		<unwantedChild></unwantedChild>
		<unwantedChild></unwantedChild>
	</secondNode>
</xml>

And then if I filter based on node name “childNode”, this would be the result:


<xml>
	<firstNode>
		<childNode></childNode>
		<childNode></childNode>
		<childNode></childNode>
	</firstNode>
</xml>