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

Question

How can I read the text from a local file using a plain file URL in JavaScript?

I’ve found plenty of examples for reading files via the HTML file input tag, but I’m struggling to find a straightforward example of accessing a file on my PC using plain JavaScript. This will be for an Electron application.

I need a code example, such as:

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

readFile(url, mimetype) {
    // Implementation here
}

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(/\\/,'\\\\')