jquery - Read a text file?

One solution would be to "read" in the 2nd document by putting it in a hidden iframe. Then you could access the HTML in that iframe as noted here and do whatever you like with that data.

jQuery provides a method $.get which can capture the data from a URL. So to "read" the html/text document, it needs to be accessible through a URL. Once you fetch the HTML contents you should just be able to wrap that markup as a jQuery wrapped set and search it as normal.

Untested, but the general gist of it...

var HTML_FILE_URL = '/whatever/html/file.html';

$(document).ready(function() {
    $.get(HTML_FILE_URL, function(data) {
        var fileDom = $(data);
        fileDom.find('h2').each(function() {
            alert($(this).text());
        });
    });
});