Question

I have a CSV file hosted on a remote server. Is there a way for jQuery to consume that file so it can be converted to a jQuery array? Would I still be facing cross-site scripting problems?

Answer 1

You’ll be running into restrictions imposed by the Same Origin Policy. In short, AJAX calls to a different domain are prohibited and will always (but for very very rare exceptions) fail, no matter what the content is.

You need to either use JSONP (mostly applicable to data returned by APIs) or proxy the request through your own server/domain.

Consuming the CSV itself is rather trivial:

csv_arr = csvstring.split(/\n/);
$.each(csv_arr, function(i,e){
    csv_arr[i] = e.split(',');
});

Edit: Caution, as @echoback mentioned, I have missed the possibility of quoted values.

Luckily, there’s an awesome plugin that turns CSV into JSON. Just like that.