Javascript's Fetch API is usually used to get data from an API. But it can also be used to retrieve files!
Fetch a .txt file
The Response object that is returned from 'fetch', has a few methods that let you retrieve the data returned from the request
- .json(): returns json
- .text(): returns a string of all the text in the response
We use the .text() method to get a string of the text from a file.
fetch('example.txt')
.then(response => response.text())
.then(textString => {
console.log(textString);
});
The process is identical if we wanted to retrieve a .csv file and do something with the data that's in the file. But we have some extra code to break up the file into rows.
fetch('example.csv')
.then(response => response.text())
.then(csvString => {
//Split the csv into rows
const rows = csvString.split('\n');
for (row of rows) {
//Split the row into each of the comma separated values
console.log(row.split(","));
}
});
Look at this GitHub repo for example code:
https://github.com/jpowell96/readFilesWithFetch
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