CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascript
happy_story
happy_story

Reputation: 1165

Do "POST" requests return XML data?

I am struggling to understand when does the server return XML data vs HTML text data, and how come responseXML can return both? Is XML data returned only when making a POST request?

It's hard to actually test these, because I couldn't properly setup a PHP server, and making a POST request keeps returning 404 bad request, but when I make a GET request, I always get the HTML document in the responseText property, but when I try to use responseXML, I get null. So, if responseXML can return either HTML or XML, why does it not return the HTML document then?

Note: Before you accuse me of not doing any research. Let me tell you that I have been doing research for the past 3 days, and the book I'm reading just doesn't clarify these differences, and does not explain what exactly is XML in the first place. It says that XML data needs to be parsed to be displayed as a text, but doesn't explain why. It's all very ambiguous. So, I would appreciate if someone could clarify things for me.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1242

Answers (2)

Masood
Masood

Reputation: 1594

This is an example of getting HTML from server response using fetch API.

fetch('https://someweb.com/api/list').then(function (response) {
    // The API call was successful!
    return response.text();
}).then(function (html) {

    // Convert the HTML string into a document object
    var parser = new DOMParser();
    var doc = parser.parseFromString(html, 'text/html');

}).catch(function (err) {
    // There was an error
    console.warn('Something went wrong.', err);
});

Upvotes: 1

Keimeno
Keimeno

Reputation: 2659

POST requests return XML data, if the backend server is configured to return XML data. Completely depends on the server you're talking to, there's no way of predicting the behavior otherwise. Also, it's worth noting that every input can change the behavior of the server. E.g. if you provide a query with a specific value, the server could also return a CSS file, instead of an HTML or XML one.

Upvotes: 3

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