Javascript to scrape a page

[artcoder]

How to I write a Javascript to call an URL like ...

http://webservices.imacination.com/d...94132&x=25&y=4

And then get the "view source" into a string variable. I then want to parse the string variable to get the answer found on that page which is the distance between two zip codes.

Also I want people's opinion as to whether this is permissible. For example, this URL is labeled as a Free Web Services. And I did not see any notices forbidding such action. Plus the Javascript is only invoked when a user hits a button, so this is not a continuously automated query. The scraped data is not store nor republished.

[felgall]

It depends on which side language are you going to use to retrieve the page that you want to display the source for as to how you code the processing that you do the ajax call to that does the retrieval. It can't be done entirely with just JavaScript because JavaScript has no access to other domains.