2009-05-31

Simple loading of HTML fragment using jQuery AJAX

jQuery provides a simple load() function to load an HTML fragment using AJAX. To test it, create a test data file called data.html:

<html>
  <body>
    <ul>
      <li>Item 1</li>
      <li>Item 2</li>
      <li>Item 3</li>
      <li>Item 4</li>
    </ul>
  </body>
</html>

Next, create a target HTML file called testLoad.html in the same folder with the following jQuery statement:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>jQuery load HTML test</title>
    <script type='text/javascript' src='js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js'></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      $(document).ready(function() {
        $('#myLinks').load('data.html ul li');
      });
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <ul id="myLinks"></ul>
  </body>
</html>

When you view testLoad.html, you should see the list items in data.html inserted into the target file, in the unordered list named myLinks.

It was a little fiddly to get this working the first time. If your source HTML file has an error, nothing seems to happen; in that case, check your browser's error console to see what went wrong. For instance, in Firefox, when my source HTML file wasn't well-formed, I found this error:

Error: mismatched tag. Expected: </ul>.
Source File: 
Line: 8, Column: 5
Source Code:
  </body>

Another thing I found is that you can't include an XML processing instruction (<? ... ?> lines) in your data file because when load() tries to insert your XML file into your target document, you would get an error like this:

Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Source File: 
Line: 1, Column: 43
Source Code:
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

2 comments:

  1. veru useful thanks! k

    ReplyDelete
  2. A short simple easy to understand example.

    ReplyDelete