ActionScript 3 (and if this was in 2, please correct me) really makes working with XML easy. However, yesterday I ran into a problem that I couldn't find the answer to. It wasn't in the (extremely excellent) ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook nor was it in the docs. Let me back up a bit and talk about what an XMLList is. Consider XML that looks like so:

<root> <kid>Jacob</kid> <kid>Lynn</kid> <kid>Noah</kid> <foo>1</foo> <moo>2</moo> </root>

While foo and moo are typical nodes, you can consider kid to be an xmlList. To read this XML list and convert into into an array, you could do this:

for each(var favoriteNode:XML in prefsXML.favorites) { if(favoriteNode.toString() != '') favorites[favorites.length] = favoriteNode.toString(); }

Where prefsXML is an XML object, prefsXML.favorites was the repeating node, and favorites was a simple array.

So this reads in the data easily enough. What I couldn't figure out was how to write back to the prefsXML object. I first tried this:

prefsXML.favorites = favorites;

But this generated XML that looked like so:

<favorites>1,2,3</favorites>

Turns out the solution wasn't too complex. Ted Patrick explained it to me (although to be fair, he had to think for a second as well :) like so:

for(i=0;i < favorites.length; i++) { prefsXML.favorites[i] = favorites[i]; }

Pretty obvious once you look at it.