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How do I load an HTML page in a div using JavaScript?

I finally found the answer to my problem. The solution is

function load_home() {
     document.getElementById("content").innerHTML='<object type="text/html" data="home.html" ></object>';
}

You can use the jQuery load function:

<div id="topBar">
    <a href ="#" id="load_home"> HOME </a>
</div>
<div id ="content">        
</div>

<script>
$(document).ready( function() {
    $("#load_home").on("click", function() {
        $("#content").load("content.html");
    });
});
</script>

Sorry. Edited for the on click instead of on load.


Fetch API

function load_home (e) {
    (e || window.event).preventDefault();

    fetch("http://www.yoursite.com/home.html" /*, options */)
    .then((response) => response.text())
    .then((html) => {
        document.getElementById("content").innerHTML = html;
    })
    .catch((error) => {
        console.warn(error);
    });
} 

XHR API

function load_home (e) {
  (e || window.event).preventDefault();
  var con = document.getElementById('content')
  ,   xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();

  xhr.onreadystatechange = function (e) { 
    if (xhr.readyState == 4 && xhr.status == 200) {
      con.innerHTML = xhr.responseText;
    }
  }

  xhr.open("GET", "http://www.yoursite.com/home.html", true);
  xhr.setRequestHeader('Content-type', 'text/html');
  xhr.send();
}

based on your constraints you should use ajax and make sure that your javascript is loaded before the markup that calls the load_home() function

Reference - davidwalsh

MDN - Using Fetch

JSFIDDLE demo


Fetching HTML the modern Javascript way

This approach makes use of modern Javascript features like async/await and the fetch API. It downloads HTML as text and then feeds it to the innerHTML of your container element.

/**
  * @param {String} url - address for the HTML to fetch
  * @return {String} the resulting HTML string fragment
  */
async function fetchHtmlAsText(url) {
    return await (await fetch(url)).text();
}

// this is your `load_home() function`
async function loadHome() {
    const contentDiv = document.getElementById("content");
    contentDiv.innerHTML = await fetchHtmlAsText("home.html");
}

The await (await fetch(url)).text() may seem a bit tricky, but it's easy to explain. It has two asynchronous steps and you could rewrite that function like this:

async function fetchHtmlAsText(url) {
    const response = await fetch(url);
    return await response.text();
}

See the fetch API documentation for more details.


I saw this and thought it looked quite nice so I ran some tests on it.

It may seem like a clean approach, but in terms of performance it is lagging by 50% compared by the time it took to load a page with jQuery load function or using the vanilla javascript approach of XMLHttpRequest which were roughly similar to each other.

I imagine this is because under the hood it gets the page in the exact same fashion but it also has to deal with constructing a whole new HTMLElement object as well.

In summary I suggest using jQuery. The syntax is about as easy to use as it can be and it has a nicely structured call back for you to use. It is also relatively fast. The vanilla approach may be faster by an unnoticeable few milliseconds, but the syntax is confusing. I would only use this in an environment where I didn't have access to jQuery.

Here is the code I used to test - it is fairly rudimentary but the times came back very consistent across multiple tries so I would say precise to around +- 5ms in each case. Tests were run in Chrome from my own home server:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.4.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="content"></div>
    <script>
        /**
        * Test harness to find out the best method for dynamically loading a
        * html page into your app.
        */
        var test_times  = {};
        var test_page   = 'testpage.htm';
        var content_div = document.getElementById('content');

        // TEST 1 = use jQuery to load in testpage.htm and time it.
        /*
        function test_()
        {
            var start = new Date().getTime();
            $(content_div).load(test_page, function() {
                alert(new Date().getTime() - start);
            });
        }

        // 1044
        */

        // TEST 2 = use <object> to load in testpage.htm and time it.
        /*
        function test_()
        {
            start = new Date().getTime();
            content_div.innerHTML = '<object type="text/html" data="' + test_page +
            '" onload="alert(new Date().getTime() - start)"></object>'
        }

        //1579
        */

        // TEST 3 = use httpObject to load in testpage.htm and time it.
       function test_()
       {
           var xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();

           xmlHttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
                if (xmlHttp.readyState == 4 && xmlHttp.status == 200)
                {
                   content_div.innerHTML = xmlHttp.responseText;
                   alert(new Date().getTime() - start);
                }
            };

            start = new Date().getTime();

            xmlHttp.open("GET", test_page, true); // true for asynchronous
            xmlHttp.send(null);

            // 1039
        }

        // Main - run tests
        test_();
    </script>
</body>
</html>