why is ajax response text prefixing and suffixing white space?

[cfgovinda]

Hi All

I am learning JS and ajax.. successfully writing my own working scripts.. but, being a newbie, still hit the wall alot. Today's wall really has me stumped:

Developing locally, I am calling a page with a working XMLHttpRequest object.. and getting the response, fine. The problem is that the response is coming back with some space chars tacked on. There are like 10-12 space chars prefixed, and one space char suffixed to my response text. Even if I just stick in a single "a" char in the (now static) page that I call, it still returns:
"<space><space><space><space><space><space><space><space><space><space><space>a<space>"
Why?!
Anyway, being a hacker for a living ;-), I attempt to just get around the issue (and understand what happened another day), with something like this:
...

myResponseTextHack = myObject.responseText;
myResponseTextHack = myResponseTextHack.replace(/ /g,'~');

...which does change *internal* space chars to tilda chars... *BUT* the darn thing STILL has the prefixing and suffixing space chars.
Why?!

Can anyone guide me here?
Thanks so much,
-Govinda

[Kor]

Originally Posted by cfgovinda

The problem is that the response is coming back with some space chars tacked on.

Sounds like it is a server-side matter, not an AJAX one. Check your server-side code which supposes to return/echo the response to the AJAX object.

[cfgovinda]

Hi Kor,

you are right. I finally did track it down to the server-side scripting language parser we are using.. it was a pre-parse script that runs invisibly like a header for every page.. it was returning line feeds that i thought were spaces.

Thanks for replying!, I appreciate it.
-Govinda