Esablishing if file exists on another domain using javascript

Question

I wish to test from javascript within my html page if the following files exist or not:

http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/ag_c.mp3  // exists
http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/og_c.mp3  // doesn't exist

My html page is not on the same domain as the files above.

Is this possible?

I wish to solve this using only a single html file (no db or php etc.) since my project is just a simple prototype.

Yes it's possible, you write a serverside script that checks if the file exists, and call that with ajax from your own server. Javascript has no access to external .mp3 files, as it has a same origin policy. — adeneo, May 14 '13 at 09:39
@adeneo OK so this is absolutely not solvable with just a single html file. In other words, I can't write a simple jsfiddle to do this lookup. — Baz, May 14 '13 at 09:42
Not really, but you could always use YQL, or link to the file directly and see if it loads ? — adeneo, May 14 '13 at 09:44
@Vignesh Vino Can you please elaborate a little more regarding JSON? — Baz, May 14 '13 at 09:48
You can do something like [this](http://jsfiddle.net/q8zQm/) ?? — adeneo, May 14 '13 at 10:04
@adeneo your solution reminds me of the img `onload`/`onerror` technique. See for example http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3019077/detecting-a-image-404-in-javascript Does audio element also have `onload`? — Myrne Stol, May 14 '13 at 10:13
@adeneo The error event isn't being triggered for me when the file doesn't exist. I'm testing using FF. http://jsfiddle.net/8QACt/ — Baz, May 14 '13 at 12:37

Baz · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-14T12:32:17.467

This looks promising, although super slow and ugly :)

var _word = "ag";
var _audio = Audio();

function update_src(audio, word) {
    if (audio.canPlayType('audio/mpeg;')) {
        audio.src = "http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds/" + word + "_c.mp3";
    } else {
        audio.src = "http://www.focloir.ie/media/ei/sounds_ogg/" + word + "_c.ogg";
    }
}

update_src(_audio, _word);
_audio.load();
_audio.addEventListener("durationchange", function () {
    alert("exits");
});

Esablishing if file exists on another domain using javascript

1 Answers1