WorkingWithFileSystem

Working with File System

In this chapter, we're going to learn how to read local files and write text data to a local file. Note that only UTF-8 encoded text files are supported.

Reading a text file

To read a text file, use FileSystem and FileUtils modules.

var FileSystem = app.getModule("filesystem/FileSystem"),
    FileUtils  = app.getModule("file/FileUtils");

First, you need to create a file object with a full pathname of an existing file. And then, you can read the text using FileUtils.readAsText function. It returns JQuery's Promise object, so you need to pass callback functions to get the text data in the file or error message. Following is an example reading a local text file.

var file = FileSystem.getFileForPath("/Users/niklaus/my-file.txt");
FileUtils.readAsText(file)
    .done(function (data) {
        console.log(data);
    })
    .fail(function (err) {
        console.error(err);
    });

Writing text to a local file

var file = FileSystem.getFileForPath("/Users/niklaus/my-new-file.txt");
var text = "First line\nSecond line\nThird line...";
FileUtils.writeText(file, text, true)
    .done(function () {
        console.log("File saved.");
    })
    .fail(function (err) {
        console.error(err);
    });