Help: How to read and store the input stream of data from a URL?

Hello everyone,
I was wondering if anyone could help me please. I want to read the html code from a url and store it into a string, but I don't know how to go about it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

So far what I have done is this function, which loads the Google search results on a page. I have a lot of other code that helps in loading the Google search page from a text box. My aim is to retrieve all the html code after doing a google search and store it in a long string (adding each line, one after another).

function search(){
var url = "";
var searchTermsBox = document.getElementById("input");
URL = "http://www.google.com/search?q=" + searchTerms;
LoadURL(URL);
}

I tried using xmlhttprequest() object, but am not sure how to use it.

***********************
var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.open('GET', url, true);
req.onreadystatechange = function (aEvt) {
if (req.readyState == 4) {
if(req.status == 200)
dump(req.responseText);
else
dump("Error loading page\n");
};
req.send(null);
alert (req);
}
var resultsgroup = req;
//var resultsgroup = document.getElementById ("res");
alert ("resultsgroup"+resultsgroup);
*******************

basically what I want to do is just retrieve the html source code from a web page and store it in a string. I could use the stream reader to concatenate and store the stream as a string. Not sure how to go about it though.
I realise all the code above may be confusing, but you can ignore it if you want and suggest some ideas.
Thank you

And where do you propose to store this string? Using JS, unless you are using AJAX and feeding that string to a server script, it can ONLY store on the client end. What you need is a server side solution (ColdFusion, ASP, PHP, etc.). The ONLY client side storage is via a cookie and that is limited by the browser as to it's size (IIRC, it's very small ... like 4KB), which will not store much code.

Thanks for replying FastCougar,

I just wanted to rephrase the question. what I want to do is store the html source code in a string variable so that I can strip all the html tags and get the retrieved Google search results.

What I am doing is building a firefox extension. I am using javascript to retrieve the Google search results.

So basically when I do a Google search, I want to retrieve the html code instead of what is seen in the screen.

Any ideas how I can do this?

Thanks again.

I guess not knowing what you want to do after is what's mixing me up here.
Have you been to code.google.com?
Chances are they have what you're looking for or a nice starting point to what you're looking for there