Question

I am requesting a website with JQuery’s ajax function. I am a little bit unclear about the responseType of the XHR request. So far I am using the “dataType: “html”” attribute but I am not happy with it.

I’d rather have a complete HTMLDocument returned which would allow me traverse its DOM tree and scrape information as needed. I believe the “document” responseType is supported by XHR2 requests.

How can this be done with JQuery? Is there a way that it will return a DOMtree that I can navigate through?

Answer 1

Simply add the following to your $.ajax() call:

xhrFields: { responseType: "document" },

To retrieve the document object, your success call should look like this:

success: function(data, textStatus, request) {
  if (textStatus == "success") {
    myResponse = request.responseXML;
  }
  else
    // Not successful
  },