XMLHttpRequest: responseText property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers, except for Service Workers.

The read-only XMLHttpRequest property responseText returns the text received from a server following a request being sent.

Value

A string which contains either the textual data received using the XMLHttpRequest or "" if the request failed or if no content has been received yet.

While handling an asynchronous request, the value of responseText always has the current content received from the server, even if it's incomplete because the data has not been completely received yet.

You know the entire content has been received when the value of readyState becomes XMLHttpRequest.DONE (4), and status becomes 200 ("OK").

Exceptions

InvalidStateError DOMException

Thrown if the XMLHttpRequest.responseType is not set to either the empty string or "text". Since the responseText property is only valid for text content, any other value is an error condition.

Examples

js
const xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open("GET", "/server", true);

// If specified, responseType must be empty string or "text"
xhr.responseType = "text";

xhr.onload = () => {
  if (xhr.readyState === xhr.DONE) {
    if (xhr.status === 200) {
      console.log(xhr.response);
      console.log(xhr.responseText);
    }
  }
};

xhr.send(null);

Specifications

Specification
XMLHttpRequest Standard
# the-responsetext-attribute

Browser compatibility

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