AJAX cross domain call

Question

I know about AJAX cross-domain policy. So I can't just call "http://www.google.com" over a ajax HTTP request and display the results somewhere on my site.

I tried it with dataType "jsonp", that actually would work, but I get a syntax error (obviously because the received data is not JSON formated)

Is there any other possiblity to receive/display data from a foreign domain? iFrames follow the same policy?

Answer 1

The only (easy) way to get cross-domain data using AJAX is to use a server side language as the proxy as Andy E noted. Here's a small sample how to implement that using jQuery:

The jQuery part:

$.ajax({
    url: 'proxy.php',
    type: 'POST',
    data: {
        address: 'http://www.google.com'
    },
    success: function(response) {
        // response now contains full HTML of google.com
    }
});

And the PHP (proxy.php):

echo file_get_contents($_POST['address']);

Simple as that. Just be aware of what you can or cannot do with the scraped data.