518301 - "not well-formed" error when loading non-XML local file with XMLHTTPRequest

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 384298

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Marcus Better]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; sv-SE) AppleWebKit/527+ (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/419.3)  konqueror/4.3.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090910 Iceweasel/3.5.3 (Debian-3.5.3-1)

Whenever a local file is loaded from a file:// URL with XHR, the error console shows a "not well-formed" error. This happens for all files regardless of content and file name extension, so also for files that have nothing to do with XML. The fact that it is logged at "Error" level makes it quite annoying.

The error does not have any other consequences, the loading succeeds anyway.

Probably a better heuristic for local files would be to assume XML for files with an "xml" extension, and not try to validate otherwise.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Execute following code:
  var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
  request.open("get", "file:///path/to/WarAndPeace.txt", false);
  request.send();
  alert(request.responseText);

Actual Results:  
The contents of the file is alerted. The console has a "not well-formed" error message.

Expected Results:  
The contents of the file is alerted. No error message in the console.

Comment 1

[arno renevier]

I can reproduce it on linux with a nightly build.

Comment 2

[Matthew Gertner]

Reproduced on Mac. This is really annoying and conceals actual errors.