Question

I’m a total beginner in JavaScript..
Can someone explain me why this will not work?
And how to make it work?

function getResults(keywords) {

        foo.foo = function() {
               var bar = foo.getSomeText; // Contain "blabla"
        };

        return bar;

    }

    // Globale scope


    alert(bar); // Do nothing

Edit (sorry for the lack of information):

That’s because I want to return some text from an xhr request, and I have to use a function to use the onreadystatechange event ..
Here is the original code :

function getResults(keywords) {
     // Effectue une requête et récupère les résultats

    var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xhr.open('GET', './autoc.php?s='+ encodeURIComponent(keywords));

    xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {
        if (xhr.readyState == 4 && xhr.status == 200) {
           var response = xhr.responseText;
          var test = response.split('|');

        }



    };


    xhr.send(null);

    return test;

}



var hum = getResults('test');
console.log(hum);

Answer 1

This should work

var bar;
var foo = {getSomeText : 'blabla'};

function getResults(keywords) {

    foo.foo = (function() {
        return bar = foo.getSomeText; // Contain "blabla"
    })();

    return bar;

}

// Globale scope
bar = getResults('hi');

alert(bar); // Do nothing​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Fiddle

• Your initial code will not work because of syntax error as bar is not
  defined.
• foo is an object here and even that is not defined. So you need to
  create the object.
• getResults returns bar which can be redefined inside the function if
  you explicitly execute the function and need to assign it to a
  variable bar in the global scope.

UPDATE

AJAX is asynchronous and you are trying to return the value from the function , which is being set in the callback function.
Because the request is asynchronous the function is already returned by the time it hits the callback function. So test will always be undefined in the second case