Setting XMLHttpRequest.responseType forbidden all of a sudden?

Question

I\'ve been using synchronous XMLHttpRequest with responseType set to \"arraybuffer\" for quite a while to load a binary file and wait until it is loaded. Today, I got this e

Answer 1

Workaround

For the casual reader, if you still need the synchronous behavior, you can download your content as string and then convert it to byte data

NOTA:
This workaround assumes the original request.response is an ASCII text.
If this assumption doesn't fit your specific use case please see jBinary.

I convert it to an ArrayBuffer.

var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.open('GET', url, false);
request.send(null);

var data;
if (request.status === 200) {
    data = stringToArrayBuffer(request.response);
} else {
    alert('Something bad happen!\n(' + request.status + ') ' + request.statusText);
}

// ...

function stringToArrayBuffer(str) {
    var buf = new ArrayBuffer(str.length);
    var bufView = new Uint8Array(buf);

    for (var i=0, strLen=str.length; i

More reading

• jBinary: High-level API for working with binary data in Javascript.
• Sending and Receiving Binary Data: Binary data handling with vanilla Javascript. (Source: Mozilla Developer Network)

References

• Converting between strings and ArrayBuffers
• Renato Mangini's original function str2ab
• Easier ArrayBuffer <-> String conversion with the Encoding API (Jeff Posnik)