Fetching data from a file

Hello, I'm looking for some help here.
The problem is I'm not very good with javascript, I try to avoid using it as much as I can, but ther's a project that I'm working on that requires some things done specifically by javascripts.

The problem is very basic, but hard for me as I dont really understand this language: I would be very grateful if someone would write me an example of a function that would fetch content from a file in the web (e.g. http://something.com/something.txt) and write it to a variable. The file would consist only of a few simbols.
Thank you in advance for any answers

 

Here it is in PHP:

<?php
$variable = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com');
echo $variable
?>

PHP:

 

Thanks, but I know how to do this on php, the problem is I MUST do that using javascript. Unless you know how to make firefox extensions work with php ^^

 

I am not well versed in javascript file functions, but may be using XML data helps you. You could see http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/JavaScript/JavaScript-and-XML/ to see of thats helpful.

 

function fetch_file(url)
{
  var xmlhttp;
  if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
  {
    // code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
    xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
  else if (window.ActiveXObject)
  {
  // code for IE6, IE5
    xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }
  else
  {
    alert("Your browser does not support XMLHTTP!");
  }

  xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (xmlhttp.readyState == 4)
   {
      var file_content = xmlhttp.responseText;
   }
 }
xmlhttp.open("GET",url, true);
xmlhttp.send(null);

}

Code (markup):

i mashed it from w3school tutorial, so maybe its buggy, but the general solution is using ajax to fetch the file..

 

You will not be able to use javascript to fetch a file from a remote server. The file that you are required to fetch must exist on the same server as the javascript that is trying to fetch it.