what exactly is a textfield within an svg ? havent heard of that so far.
you can access different parts of an svg using getChild() http://processing.org/learning/basics/getchild.html
but that is probably not solving your problem. I am not really sure what you want to achieve, but there might be another solution for the problem.

Here's what I mean by textfield, perhaps I should have said text element.

i dont think you can easily do that. why not use the processing text() instead?

you can do it but by loading the svg as a String[]

true, as svg is actually an xml file. you can load change and save it. but there is no real build in function to do something like that.
You would have to do it like clankill3r said...

jwilcock,

In short: Yes. SVG is an XML-based technology. The graphical representation is an XML-tree that is stored as part of the DOM. The JavaScript, Java, and other client-based scripting/programming environments that have access to the DOM can be used for this purpose.

To facilitate locating the particular field within the SVG structure, the most effective way is to use the SVG g operator, which has an "id" attribute (see the actual W3C SVG specification for the precise syntax and structure). Once the name has been defined, the standard DOM call getElementById can be used to identify the node, to wit:

      <svg:g id="kumquat">
        <svg:text style="font-size:48px" x="100" y="200" fill="black">your text</svg:text></svg:g>

The svg:text node will be the child of the svg:g node with the specified id (kumquat). The actual text node will be the grandchild (the child of the svg:text node which is in turn the child of the svg:g node).

My apologies if there are garbles in the above example, I extracted it from a far larger project.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com