jQuery: read text file from file system

You can't load a file from your local filesystem, like this, you need to put it on a a web server and load it from there. On the same site as you have the JavaScript loaded from.

EDIT: Looking at this thread, you can start chrome using option --allow-file-access-from-files, which would allow access to local files.

specify the full path of the file url

This is working fine in firefox at least.

The problem I was facing is, that I got an XML object in stead of a plain text string. Reading an xml-file from my local drive works fine (same directory as the html), so I do not see why reading a text file would be an issue.

I figured that I need to tell jquery to pass a string in stead of an XML object. Which is what I did, and it finally worked:

function readFiles()
{
    $.get('file.txt', function(data) {
        alert(data);
    }, "text");
}

Note the addition of '"text"' at the end. This tells jquery to pass the contents of 'file.txt' as a string in stead of an XML object. The alert box will show the contents of the text file. If you remove the '"text"' at the end, the alert box will say 'XML object'.