Why does jQuery insist my plain text is not “well-formed”?

Question

I\'m making an AJAX call to retrieve some plain text:

$.ajax({
  url:         \"programData.txt\",
  type:        \"GET\",
  dataType:    \"text\",
  cache:          


        

Answer 1

You get different response codes when opening a local file via XMLHttpRequest than you do when using an HTTP request. I suspect that since you are opening a a local file, jQuery is choking on the response code, thinking it's an error because it's not 200 OK.

Reference

Example: Non-HTTP synchronous request

Despite its name, XMLHttpRequest can be used for non-HTTP requests. This example shows how to use it to fetch a file from the local file system.

var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.open('GET', 'file:///home/user/file.json', false); 
req.send(null);
if(req.status == 0)
  dump(req.responseText);

The key thing to note here is that the result status is being compared to 0 for success instead of 200. This is because the file and ftp schemes do not use HTTP result codes