How to read a local file in Javascript (Running from an Electron App)

Question

I have been searching for over an hour or so, and I cant find an answer to my question. Is there a way to get the text from a local file, using just a plain old file URL?

I have found numerous ways to read a file via file input HTML tag, but I have had an incredible pain, finding a code example that can find a file, on my PC, using just plain old JS.

The code will be inside an electron application.

I need code examples. Something like this:

readFile("file:\\\\C:\path\to\file.txt","text/plain");

readFile(url,mimetype){
 ....
}

Answer 1

1. Reading a file is done using node and is not dependent on electron
2. Where you have the code for creating a window add this code

const fs = require("fs");

function readFile(fileURL,mimeType){
   //readfile does not accept the file:\\\ thing, so we remove it
   const pathToFile = fileURL.replace("file:\\\\",'');

   fs.readFile(pathToFile,mimeType,(err,contents)=>{
     if(err){
        console.log(err);
        return;
     }
     console.log(contents);
   })
}

readFile('C:\\Users\\<userAccount>\\Documents\\test.txt','utf8')
//If your on windows you'll need to use double backslashes for the paths
//here's an example regex to do that

pathToFile = pathToFile.replace(/\\/,'\\\\')