[SOLVED] Get text nodes separately (in the correct order) with fast-xml-parser?

Get text nodes separately (in the correct order) with fast-xml-parser?

No matter what options I try, I seem to get all text nodes clustered together, without any information on where the inner XML nodes were inserted. It's easier to explain with a simple example:

<a>left <b>middle</b> right</a>

I expect this to give me something like this:

{
  tag: 'a',
  children: [
    'left ',
    { tag: 'b', children: ['middle'] },
    ' right',
  ]
}

The exact format doesn't matter, but middle is between left and right. The order of children elements is important to me. With fast-xml-parser, what I get instead is the following:

{
  "a": {
    "#text": "left  right",
    "b": "middle",
  }
}

I don't mind the different format, but I lost the information about the position of the <b>middle</b> node. From the JavaScript tree version of the XML file, there's no way to differentiate between these files, as they all parse into the same structure.

<a>left  right<b>middle</b></a>

<a><b>middle</b>left  right</a>

<a>left <b>middle</b> right</a>

<a>le<b>middle</b>ft  right</a>

Is there an option which will allow me to preserve the order of text nodes?

Solution

Unfortunately, it seems like the answer is that this option is simply not available in fast-xml-parser, as per this issue I found: https://github.com/NaturalIntelligence/fast-xml-parser/issues/175. Text nodes will get merged as one, and the team member explains that this is "not a bug but expected behavior".