Thanks for the reply but by not text I meant some text mixed with a few nulls and some group separators followed by a block of a few hundred capital letters (what I was trying to extract). Anyway ,it works in firefox and I guess thats good enough for me. Now why does everything I write not work in IE.

Anyone have any ideas why I get a "The data necessary to complete this operation is not yet available." error in IE? Edit: I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the file not being text.function http (m, u, d, f) { var r = null; if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { r = new XMLHttpRequest(); if (r.overrideMimeType) { r.overrideMimeType('text/xml'); } } else if (window.ActiveXObject) { try { r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP'); } catch(e) { try { r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP'); } catch(e){} } } if (r) { r.onreadystatechange = function() { if (r.readyState == 4) { alert(r.readyState); //This is 4 when the error occures if (r.status == 200) { **f(r.responseText);** //ERROR here "The data necessary to complete this operation is not yet available." } } }; r.open(m, u, true); r.setRequestHeader('Connection', 'close'); if (d) r.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'); r.send(d); } } var df=document.getElementsByTagName("PARAM")[0].value; http('GET','http://example.net/'+df,'', function(data){alert(data);});
-- modified at 18:54 Friday 27th April, 2007

Go to yahoo.com and click on the exclamation point.