Inserting HTML from an external source?

Hi all,

I need to write a bit of javascript that can read the contents of an external file (e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/myscript.php) and insert it into a web page (e.g. http://www.myotherdomain.com/mypage.html).

I envisage something simple in mypage.html like:


.
.
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
data = js_readfile("http://www.myotherdomain.com/myscript.php");
document.write(data);
</script>
.
.


That seems really simple and what I'm asking for (in a particularly long-winded way!) is the javascript equivalent of the PHP function readfile (referred to as js_readfile in the example).

Clearly it could not be *exactly* like the PHP readfile function or this would create an obvious security risk! I imagine it to be a function which will attempt only to read from qualified sources (i.e. webservers, ftp servers, etc), which are authorised to publish data.

TIA,
Mike.

Only way would be to have your serverside page write the data onto the page since it is from a different domain.

Eric

You mean turn mypage.html into mypage.php and stick in a bit of PHP in instead of Javascript? So it's not possible to do it in javascript?

Sorry to jump in - he means that javascript cannot do this for security reasons and that if you want this to work, you would have to fetch the content from a different domain using a server side script and then make this content available someplace on your domain. Javascript could then fetch this content from your domain.

Here are a couple of related links -
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/same-origin.html
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/11/09/fixing-ajax-xmlhttprequest-considered-harmful.html

Ok, thanks for the links, I understand now! :thumbsup: