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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T12:01:18+00:00

I am trying to read a binary file MyFile.xxx that is at the same

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I am trying to read a binary file MyFile.xxx that is at the same domain as MyFile.html. Using JQuery I just try to display an alert with the number of characters in MyFile.xxx, and print the numeric representation of each one. However, I get different results depending on the browser:

Google Chrome: I correctly get an alert displaying 33, and the correct integers
Firefox: Alert displays “Undefined” and no integers are printed.
IE9: Alert displays “1” and no integers are printed.

Any ideas? Thanks

MyFile.html

<html>                                                                  
 <head>                                                                  
 <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>          
 <script type="text/javascript">                                         
    $.get('/MyFile.xxx', function(a){
    var l=a.length,x=[l];
    alert(l);
    for(i=0;i<l;i++){
      x[i]=a[i].charCodeAt(0);
      document.write(x[i]);
      document.write("<br>");
    }    
});                              
 </script>                                                               
 </head>                                                                 
 <body>                                                                  
 </body>                                                                 
 </html>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try this:

    $.ajax( "/MyFile.xxx", {
    dataType: "text",
    beforeSend: function( xhr ) {
        xhr.overrideMimeType( "text/plain; charset=x-user-defined");
    },

    success: function( data ) {
        var len = data.length,
            str = "";

        for( var i = 0; i < len; ++i ) {
            var byte = data.charCodeAt(i) & 0xFF;
            str += byte + " ";

        }
        document.body.innerHTML = str;
    }
});

    Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/SXgfu/ (Shows the UTF-8 bytes for åöä)

    Note that IE9 does not support this. It does not support any other ways of getting raw bytes of the response either.

    If you are using PHP, you could use this work-around for IE:

    $.get("/base64encoder.php?file=MyFile.xxx", function(data) {
    data = decode64(data);
    var len = data.length,
        str = "";
    for (var i = 0; i < len; ++i) {
        var byte = data.charCodeAt(i) & 0xFF;
        str += byte + " ";
    }
    document.body.innerHTML = str;
}, "text");

    Where base64encoder.php is something like:

    <?php
echo base64_encode(file_get_contents( $_GET['file'] ));

    remember to sanitize the above, otherwise it’s a huge security vulnerability

    and decode64 (src http://ntt.cc/2008/01/19/base64-encoder-decoder-with-javascript.html):

    var keyStr = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP" +
           "QRSTUVWXYZabcdef" +
           "ghijklmnopqrstuv" +
           "wxyz0123456789+/" +
           "=";

function decode64(input) {
    var output = "";
    var chr1, chr2, chr3 = "";
    var enc1, enc2, enc3, enc4 = "";
    var i = 0;
    // remove all characters that are not A-Z, a-z, 0-9, +, /, or =
    var base64test = /[^A-Za-z0-9\+\/\=]/g;
    if (base64test.exec(input)) {
        alert("There were invalid base64 characters in the input text.\n" + "Valid base64 characters are A-Z, a-z, 0-9, '+', '/',and '='\n" + "Expect errors in decoding.");
    }
    input = input.replace(/[^A-Za-z0-9\+\/\=]/g, "");
    do {
        enc1 = keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
        enc2 = keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
        enc3 = keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
        enc4 = keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
        chr1 = (enc1 << 2) | (enc2 >> 4);
        chr2 = ((enc2 & 15) << 4) | (enc3 >> 2);
        chr3 = ((enc3 & 3) << 6) | enc4;
        output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr1);
        if (enc3 != 64) {
            output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr2);
        }
        if (enc4 != 64) {
            output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr3);
        }
        chr1 = chr2 = chr3 = "";
        enc1 = enc2 = enc3 = enc4 = "";
    } while (i < input.length);
    return output;
}
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