How to manually create msxml document in IE10

I looked at this question and I understand that when dealing with an ajax response, it is possible to instruct IE10 to create an msxml document instead of a native XML document. This is in order to use legacy xpath methods such as selectSingleNode.

However, in my case I am not reading the XML from an ajax response, I am reading it from raw text in javascript. E.g., this is a code snippet that works in most browsers:

var xmlString = "<a><b>some data</b></a>";
vor xmlDocument = new DOMParser().parseFromString(xmlString, "text/xml");

In IE10, DOMParser returns a native XML document. What can I do differently here in order to get an MSXML document, similarly to the way it's done with ajax?

Solution

You'll have to explicitly create an instance of the parser using ActiveXObject:

var xmlDocument = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLDOM');
xmlDocument.async = 'false';
xmlDocument.loadXML(xmlString);

alert(xmlDocument.selectSingleNode('//a/b').text);