Reading File Content

The questions "Can I read a file... " show up on the regular basis. The answer to accessing files on the same domain is the XMLHTTP object. Following is a simple wrapper that accounts for differences in Gecko and IE5.5+ implementation and returns the content of a file in a string, or null if an error occured:

function getFile(filename)
{ oxmlhttp = null;
try
{ oxmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
oxmlhttp.overrideMimeType("text/xml");
}
catch(e)
{ try
{ oxmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
}
catch(e)
{ return null;
}
}
if(!oxmlhttp) return null;
try
{ oxmlhttp.open("GET",filename,false);
oxmlhttp.send(null);
}
catch(e)
{ return null;
}
return oxmlhttp.responseText;
}