Returning HTML With fetch()

Question

I'm trying to fetch a file and return it's HTML. However it's not as simple as I'd have imagined.

    fetch('/path/to/file')
    .then(function (response) {
      return response.body;
    })
    .then(function (body) {
      console.log(body);
    });

This returns an object called ReadableByteStream. How do I use this to grab the HTML file content?

If I change the contents of /path/to/file to be a JSON string, and change the above to:

    fetch('/path/to/file')
    .then(function (response) {
      return response.json();
    })
    .then(function (json) {
      console.log(json);
    });

... it returns the JSON correctly. How do I do fetch HTML?

Answer 1

You need to use the .text() method, instead of .json(). This converts the byte stream into plain text, which can be parsed by the browser as HTML.

Answer 2

You can download the html with fetch and then parse it with DomParser API.

fetch('somePage.html')
    .then(function(response) {
        // When the page is loaded convert it to text
        return response.text()
    })
    .then(function(html) {
        // Initialize the DOM parser
        var parser = new DOMParser();

        // Parse the text
        var doc = parser.parseFromString(html, "text/html");

        // You can now even select part of that html as you would in the regular DOM 
        // Example:
        // var docArticle = doc.querySelector('article').innerHTML;

        console.log(doc);
    })
    .catch(function(err) {  
        console.log('Failed to fetch page: ', err);  
    });

Answer 3

It should be:

fetch('/path/to/file').then(function(response) {
    return response.text();
}).then(function(string) {
    console.log(string);
}).catch(function(err) {  
    console.log('Fetch Error', err);  
});