XML DOM » HttpRequest » responseText

Syntax:

httpRequest.responseText

This property represents the response entity body as a string.

The XMLHTTP object tries to decode the response into a unicode string, assuming a default encoding of UTF-8. However, it can decode any type of UCS-2 (big or little endian) or UTC-4 encoding as long as the server sends the appropriate unicode byte order mark. It does not process the XML '?' coding declaration. If you know the response is going to be XML, you should use the responseXML property instead.