Question

I would like to grab an element from a remote HTML page. As I am requesting data from a different domain I am using the below code to add the source as a script. Yes, very dodgy.

<script type="text/javascript">
    var script = document.createElement('script');
    script.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
    script.setAttribute('src', 'http://remoteDomain.com/page.html');
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
</script>

The above code fetches and appends the entire page to my document head. Seems to work okay. However now I would like to able to grab an element by ID, or even regex from this source.

Can this be done?

I am aware that the above code is dirty, so I’d be happy to receive any suggestions to clean it up!

Answer 1

Indeed very dodgy… But there are crossdomain AJAX tehniques that you can use. Some help here: http://usejquery.com/posts/9/the-jquery-cross-domain-ajax-guide