I want to have a jquery function use ajax to return only the raw data from a controller action. If I have an alert() statement in the onsuccess function of a $.post() call to alert the return data it spits out the entire html document. How can I only have it return an array of data?

The easy no frills way is to do something like this..

// .. your controller function
echo "Some String";
die(); // or exit() or whatever to prevent loading SS templates

The other option is to use renderWith() on that function and have a empty template or one which contains just the information you want to pass back.