Question

I know very, very little of javascript, but I’m interested in writing a script which needs information from another webpage. It there a javascript equivalent of something like urllib2? It doesn’t need to be very robust, just enough to process a simple GET request, no need to store cookies or anything and store the results.

Answer 1

There is the XMLHttpRequest, but that would be limited to the same domain of your web site, because of the Same Origin Policy.

However, you may be interested in checking out the following Stack Overflow post for a few solutions around the Same Origin Policy:

• Ways to circumvent the same-origin policy

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UPDATE:

Here’s a very basic (non cross-browser) example:

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('GET', '/questions/3315235', true);
xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {
  if (xhr.readyState === 4)  { 
    console.log(xhr.responseText);
  }
};
xhr.send(null);

If you run the above in Firebug, with Stack Overflow open, you’d get the HTML of this question printed in your JavaScript console:

JavaScript access another webpage http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/5545/fbugxml.png