I am using the xmlread function to parse an xml file. The file has the following structure:

<Parent1>
    <Child1>
        <Data1>1</Data1>
        <Data2>2</Data2>
     </Child1>
    <Child2>
        <Data1>1</Data1>
        <Data2>2</Data2>
    </Child2>
 </Parent1>

I use the xmlread function as follows:

        data = xmlread('xmlfile.xml');

Originally, the following is true:
    data.item(0) == Parent1
    data.item(0).item(0) == Child1
    data.item(0).item(1) == Child2
    data.item(0).getLength == 2

However, when I open the xml file in XML Notepad and click save (without touching anything else in the file), the next time I try to parse the file I get:
    data.item(0) == Parent1
    data.item(0).item(0) == [#text:]
    data.item(0).item(1) == Child1
    data.item(0).item(2) == [#text:]
    data.item(0).item(3) == Child2
    data.item(0).item(4) == [#text:]
    data.item(0).getLength == 5

Any ideas as to what is going on? Any and all help is appreciated.

Thanks.

Sorry to bother you but I have the exact same problem but on my original xml file. Did you ever find an answer? It's fairly easy to resolve by removing all those #text entries in a loop but very annoying.

Thanks
Philippe

Well, I discovered that the "#text" items were due to whitespace characters in the xml file. For my case, they were newline characters. If I remember correctly (it's been a while), the original xml file did not contain newline characters in it. That is, if you opened it in a text editor, it was all on one line. When I would re-save the file using XML Editor, it would format the file so that when you opened it in a text editor, it would appear formatted properly. That is, it would appear on multiple lines.

I wrote the following function to skip the items that were "#text".

===========================================
%% skipItem Subfunction
% Returns the item number of the next child that is not a newline or
% whitespace child, after start_num. Returns 'none' if there are no 
% more valid item numbers.

function item_num = skipItem(parent,start_num)
    item_num  = start_num;
    if isempty(parent.item(item_num))
        item_num = 'none';
        return
    end
    item_name = parent.item(item_num).getNodeName;
    while strcmp(item_name,'#text')
        item_num = item_num + 1;
        if isempty(parent.item(item_num))
            item_num = 'none';
            return
        end
        item_name = parent.item(item_num).getNodeName;
    end
end
===========================================

Here is an example of how to use this function:

data = xmlread(filename);
parent = data.item(0);
child_item = skipItem(parent,0)
child = parent.item(child_item);

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have other questions.