Reading from text file with HTML and Javascript
Question: We currently have a python script that uses the Twitter API to generate a text
file with a user's latest tweets.

We now need to somehow display them in a webpage, so we attempted to use an
XMLHttpRequest to read the local text file and display it. Formatting is not
important at the moment, we are just trying to read directly from the file.

The code we have so far, which is mostly from what we found online, is as
follows:

    
    
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
    <head>
    <script>
    function loadXMLDoc()
    {
    if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
      {// code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
      xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
      }
    else
      {// code for IE6, IE5
      xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
      }
    xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function()
      {
        document.write("Test. ");
        document.getElementById("myDiv").innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
      }
    xmlhttp.open("GET","twitterFeed.txt",false);
    xmlhttp.send();
    }
    </script>
    </head>
    <body>
    
    <h2>Using the XMLHttpRequest object</h2>
    <div id="myDiv"></div>
    <button type="button" onclick="loadXMLDoc()">Change Content</button>
    
    </body>
    </html>
    

Thanks in advance.

EDIT:

The issue we have is that it is not outputting anything, regardless of what is
written in the text file. It does print out the "Test. " string that we were
using to ensure that the function was being called.

As far as we can tell, there aren't any js or net errors showing up.


Answer: If you call `document.write` on a document in the closed state (which the
document will be in as the DOM will have been completely parsed) it will
implicitly call `document.open` which will _wipe out the existing document_.

You then write out _Test._ , which you can see.

Among the things that will have been deleted will be `<div id="myDiv"></div>`
so `document.getElementById("myDiv").innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;` will
fail.

**Don't use`document.write`**.

