XMLHttpRequest.responseXML

The XMLHttpRequest.responseXML read-only property returns a Document containing the HTML or XML retrieved by the request; or null if the request was unsuccessful, has not yet been sent, or if the data can't be parsed as XML or HTML.

Usually, the response is parsed as "text/xml". If the responseType is set to "document" and the request was made asynchronously, instead the response is parsed as "text/html". responseXML is null for any other types of data, as well as for data: URLs.

If the server doesn't specify the Content-Type as "text/xml" or "application/xml", you can use XMLHttpRequest.overrideMimeType() to parse it as XML anyway.

This property isn't available to workers.

Syntax

var data = XMLHttpRequest.responseXML;

Value

A Document from parsing the XML or HTML received using XMLHttpRequest, or null if no data was received or if the data is not XML/HTML.

Exceptions

InvalidStateError

The responseType isn't either "document" or an empty string.

Example

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
xhr.open('GET', '/server');

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

// Force the response to be parsed as XML
xhr.overrideMimeType('text/xml');

xhr.onload = function () {
  if (xhr.readyState === xhr.DONE && xhr.status === 200) {
    console.log(xhr.response, xhr.responseXML);
  }
};

xhr.send();

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• XMLHttpRequest
• XMLHttpRequest.response
• XMLHttpRequest.responseType
• Parsing and serializing XML
• Parsing XML into a DOM tree: DOMParser
• Serializing a DOM tree into XML: XMLSerializer (specifically, the serializeToString() method)