jquery - Read a text file?

Question

I have an html file that I'd like to open and read from, but I'm not entirely sure how to do that... Basically, it's a fairly large file (big.html), and, in a separate file (titles.html), I have some jquery code that I'd like to use to find certain elements (namely, h2 tags) and get the inner text from those tags and write just that text to titles.html... I'm not sure, particularly, how to open a separate file and read from it, and secondly, I'm not sure if the code below will work when it comes to getting the text within the h2 tags...

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("h2").each(function() {
        var title = $(this).text();
        $("#mydiv").append(title);
    });
});

...

<div id="mydiv"></div>

I'm a bit confused how to do that with jquery... I'm pretty new to the whole thing, so I'm not even sure it's possible...

Answer 1

jQuery provides a method $.get which can capture the data from a URL. So to "read" the html/text document, it needs to be accessible through a URL. Once you fetch the HTML contents you should just be able to wrap that markup as a jQuery wrapped set and search it as normal.

Untested, but the general gist of it...

var HTML_FILE_URL = '/whatever/html/file.html';

$(document).ready(function() {
    $.get(HTML_FILE_URL, function(data) {
        var fileDom = $(data);
        fileDom.find('h2').each(function() {
            alert($(this).text());
        });
    });
});

Answer 2

One solution would be to "read" in the 2nd document by putting it in a hidden iframe. Then you could access the HTML in that iframe as noted here and do whatever you like with that data.