*urgent* Download (and parse) file from URL.

Hello, guys. I have decided to attempt to make a dynamic news application in one or two days as a project for my school, which would download a file from dropbox (through the public link) containing information about articles and links to them/any images that are used.

The problem i am facing, however, is getting the files to download seamlessly (without alerting the user, at least no prompts) and then parsing them.

So, my questions are:

1.) Is there a way one can download a file from a URL regardless what platform the export is done on (android, website) and (later) parse it as a text string, line by line, without modifying the parameters of the hosting server (e.g. i have no access to modifying those http headers on dropbox)?

2.) How would one parse such a file in C2, by reading it line by line (is there a way to retrieve the line count of a string and then do a loop from 1 to stringcount, then retrieving the text for each line of the file, for it to be interpreted)?

If you host the information yourself on a site, and are able to put it in a mysql database, you could easily fetch its information through ajax.

You could make a ittle php web app to serve a content manager/adder for the news, and a application in cs2 to retrieve the information.

The goal is to use Dropbox as the main storage place for the files (i doubt that i have time for anything else). Is there a way to do exactly what i described, without having to resort to workarounds so soon?

It appears that i have gotten the AJAX functionality to work (at least it seems to function when i test it through chrome with C2's preview function), however it appears that AJAX does not support UTF-8 text encoding. Is there a way around this, such as using one of the compress plugins (deflate, base32) to compress the text and afterwards decompress it? Would this work? What else is there to do?

What about parsing xml ?

I want to have my own custom syntax, having xml layered on top of it seems like a hassle. Also, i think i fixed it - Notepad++ has another encoding set by default, and although it displays UTF-8 characters just fine (somehow), this causes problems with AJAX. Holy hell, i actually managed to do this.