Adobe CF XML Issue

While working with an XML document the other day I noticed some "interesting" behavior when trying to access a XML Element that started with an underscore. The XML document is valid, parsed correctly and also displayed correctly when dumping the XML Document out.

This issue only showed itself when trying to access the XML Element using dot notation.

Here is an example xml:

when trying to access the the _UIVersionString element in Adobe Coldfusion an empty string is returned.

The only apparent way to access the element with the underscore is using xmlSearch with an xPath string as follows:

The problem with this is that xmlSearch returns an array.

Another interesting thing is that Adobe Coldfusion supposedly stores XML internally as structures, so I would assume that accessing a structure key with an underscore would produce the same issue. This is actually not the case which can be seen in the following code snippet:

Bug or Feature?

I will submit this as a bug anyway to see what happens. By the way this "bug" exists in CF8 and 9, I have not tested it in CF7. Railo handles the XML correctly.

Happy Coding...