I was looking through Mozilla's JS in JS code and came across the snarf function. It's not defined in the javascript, it seems, just in the C version here. It isn't very well-commented, though. I Google searched this to no avail.
Is this a standard part of JavaScript? (My guess is no.) Is it some kind of extension? What is it supposed to do?
It loads a file and returns the contents of the file in a string.
No, it is not standard. It is the part of Mozilla's Narcissus (JS in JS interpreter implemented on top of SpiderMonkey). snarf(filename) grabs the content of the file and returns it as a string for further processing (e.g., evaluation).
i was just reading the code for narcissus and saw snarf, and googled it, and came here! weird!