We Keep Coding

Using Javascript to get content from another website

I have a plugin that puts all the content in a database, so I cannot put PHP code into the plugin, it won't execute. It does allow Javascript though.
So how would I go about using javascript to contact a page and get the data, if I have the data just pass the content, like this:
field1=data|field2=data|field3=data|field4=data
like that string.
Is there a way to get that content using javascript or jquery, so that I could parse that and pull the data I need?
I can build a php script to output that data, since I cannot have PHP executed in the plugin, so I could still securely get the data I need, since I could pull the data and make sure to pass a key, so it is secure.

Generate pages based on url using Javascript in asp.net

At the moment I can generate pages by drawing the content with javascript based on ajax requests for JSON files which describe what is to be drawn.
The result is good, but I want users to be able to access a page such as www.example.com/SomePage where I use SomePage in javascript to display the content based on it.
Since SomePage isn't an actual existing .aspx page I get 404 error from the server. Could I capture the url path and hand it somehow to the javascript to generate the page dynamically? Thanks in advance!

You look for the HttpContext.RewritePath Method.
In a short, you read your path eg: www.example.com/SomePage
and using the HttpContext.RewritePath you translated it to
www.example.com/editor.aspx?id=SomePage
and there you have your SomePage value to use
on your javascript code
and still the url show www.example.com/SomePage

Webpage content converted into JSON

In my textbook the URL http://services.faa.gov/airport/status/SFO?format=application/JSON was provided. That link points to a page that provides the content of the original page in JSON format. I want to format another webpage's content into JSON so I tried copying the method used, (Also the link my professor provided for an assignment uses the same format) and I get nothing. http://www.programmableweb.com/apitag/weather?format=application/JSON Clicking the link from here leads to a search of the website via a search engine. Copy pasting that exact same link just takes you to the actual webpage. My question is, why cant I just append ?format=application/JSON to any url for the JSON format of the webpage?
If it matters I'm trying to get JSON data to display via a Chrome extension.

My question is, why cant I just append ?format=application/JSON to any url for the JSON format of the webpage?
Because a URL is just data, and there is nothing standard about a query string parameter called "format". The server has to be designed to give you JSON before it can or will do that.

That particular website simply provides a feature where you can get the same data in an alternate format such as JSON. Not all websites provide features like that, and not all of them implement it with the same URL parameter. Some sites may have URLs ending with .html be HTML pages and ones ending with .json provide the same info in JSON. Others might provide a separate API. You might check that website to see if it has a "developers" section that gives information on their API, if they have one.

Using DOMXpath to extract JSON data

I have used php simple html dom to no success on this issue.
Now I have gone to DOMDocument and DOMXpath and this does seem promising.
Here is my issue:
I am trying to scrape data from a page which is loaded via a web service request after the page initially shows. It is only milliseconds but because of this, normal scraping shows a template value as opposed to the actual data.
I have found the endpoint url using chrome developer network settings. So if I enter that url into the browser address bar the data displays nicely in JSON format. All Good.
My problem arises because any time the site is re-visited or the page refreshed, the suffix of the endpoint url is randomly-generated so I can't hard-code this url into my php file. For example the end of the url is "?=253648592" on first visit but on refresh it could be "?=375482910". The base of the url is static.
Without getting into headless browsers (I tried and MY head hurts!) is there a way to have Xpath find this random url when the page loads?
Sorry for being so long-winded but I wanted to explain as best I could.

It's probably much easier and faster to just use a regex if you only need one item/value from the HTML. I would like to give an example but therefor I would need a more extended snippet of how the HTML looks like that contains the endpoint that you want to fetch.
Is it possible to give a snippet of the HTML that contains the endpoint?

How can I retrieve data from an external XML file and place it in an HTML file?

I am trying to retrieve data from an XML file that is not located on my site's server, and then use that data fro various things, such as charts. Here is one example: http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.78158&lon=-73.96648&FcstType=dwml. This is an XML file with the weather data for central park. I want to retrieve the data that is in the <value>tag, which is in the <pressure> tag, so I can create a graph with barometric pressure. I would prefer to do this with JavaScript, but I don't think it's possible to do so when the file isn't on my server.
Note: I do not want a different solution to retrieve the pressure data from somewhere else, because I want to retrieve other pieces of data from other XML files as well.

There's an interesting article about using Yahoo! Pipes to transform Xml weather data to JSON and use the result in a web page without need for any server side stuff (PHP, curl, etc.).
EDIT
Being new to jQuery myself, I a had to dig a little more to find out that (almost) everything described in the first article can be condensed down to
$.getJSON("<your Yahoo pipes url here>&_callback=?", function (data) {
alert(data.value.items[0].data[0].parameters.wordedForecast.text[0]);
});
using jQuerys builtin JSONP.
Pitfall!
Beware that Yahoo expects the callback url param to be named _callback
Nice summary on Cross-domain communications with JSONP which helped a lot to come up with this answer.

If your javascript code is on a server (as opposed to a mobile device), have PHP code load the xml, escape it and insert it into the HTML page. Then you just have to grab that in your code and process it with DOMParser.

You could use curl to pull the data to your server and act on it from there.
curl -o data.txt "http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.78158&lon=-73.96648&FcstType=dwml"
This will give you the information in a file called data.txt. You could then either parse it server side and then just give the bits of data needed, or make the whole file available to your client, since they are both now in the same domain.