XML DOM previousSibling Property | Tutorial

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XML DOM previousSibling Property

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Element Object

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Definition and Usage

The previousSibling property returns the previous sibling node (the next node in the same tree level) of the selected element.

If no such node exists, the property returns NULL.

Syntax

elementNode.previousSibling

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Tips and Notes

Note: Firefox and most other browsers will treat empty whitespace or line breaks between nodes as text nodes, while Internet Explorer will ignore whitespace text nodes between nodes. Therefore, in the example below, we will use a function to check the node type of the previous sibling.

The node type of an element node is 1, so if the previous sibling is not an element node, it will move to the previous node and then continue to check if this node is an element node. This process continues until the previous sibling element node is found. Using this method, we can get the correct result in all browsers.

Tip: To learn more about browser differences, visit our DOM Browsers chapter in our XML DOM Tutorial.

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Example

The following code snippet uses loadXMLDoc() to load "books.xml" into xmlDoc and gets the previous sibling node from the first <author> element:

Example

// Get the previous sibling node of an element node
function get_previoussibling(n)
{
x=n.previousSibling;
while(x.nodeType!=1)
  {
  x=x.previousSibling;
  }
return x;
}

xmlDoc=loadXMLDoc("books.xml");

x=xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("author");
document.write(x.nodeName);
document.write(" = ");
document.write(x.childNodes.nodeValue);

y=get_previoussibling(x);
document.write("<br>Previous sibling: ");
document.write(y.nodeName);
document.write(" = ");
document.write(y.childNodes.nodeValue);

The code above will output:

author = Giada De Laurentiis

Previous sibling: title = Everyday Italian

Try it yourself »

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Try it Yourself

nextSibling - Get the next sibling node of a node

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Element Object