Getting content of a script file using Javascript

Question

I have the following script element in my web page:

<script src="default.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Using JavaScript, I want to be able to retrieve the content of the script file. I know I could use an ajax request to get the data but then I am getting something from the server that I already have locally.

So what I would prefer to do is retrieve the content from the DOM (if that's possible) or something that has the same result.

Cheers Anthony

UPDATE

I was trying to simplify the question, maybe a bad a idea, I thought this way would cause less questions.

The real situation I have is as follows, I actually have

<script type="text/html" class="jq-ItemTemplate_Approval">
   ...
   html template that is going to be consumed by jQuery and jTemplate
   ...
</script>

Now this works fine but it means each time the page loads I have to send down the template as part of the HTML of the main page. So my plan was to do the following:

<script src="template.html" type="text/html"></script>

This would mean that the browser would cache the content of template.html and I would not have to send it down each time. But to do this I need to be able to get the content from the file.

Also in this case, as far as I know, requesting the content via ajax isn't going to help all that much because it has to go back to the server to get the content anyway.

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, you don't want to use Ajax to load an html template text, but rather have it loaded with the rest of the page. If you control the server side, you can always include the template text in an invisible div tag that you then reference from Javascript:

<div id="template" style="display:none;">
...template text...
</div>
<script>
// pops up the template text.
alert(document.getElementById("template").innerHTML);
</script>

If you are just looking for to load the template so that you can have it cached, you can put the contents in a variable like this:

<script>
var template = "template text..";
</script>

or you can load it using ajax and store the template in a variable so it is accessible. It's pretty trivial in jquery:

var template;
$.get("template.html", function(data){
  template = data;
});

Answer 2

unless you load a script as literal text in the page, it does not exist as text. It is interpreted by the browser and melded into the runtime, with any other scripts.

If you want the source you have to fetch it again,if with Ajax get the responseText.

It will come from the browser cache, and doesn't have to be downloaded again.