Question

I have this code:

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  if (req.method.toLowerCase() === "post") {
    res.writeHead(200);
    req.on('data', function (data) {
      console.log(data.toString());
    });
    res.end();
  }
}).listen(8006);

and if I try to upload a file with a curl command like curl http://localhost:8006/upload -X POST -F file=@filetoupload.txt, I’ll get the name of the file and the contents of the file printed out, which in this case are the following:

------------------------------5d02ba973600
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file"; filename="filetoupload.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain


<!-- start slipsum code -->

Do you see any Teletubbies in here? Do you see a slender
plastic tag clipped to my shirt with my name printed on
it? Do you see a little Asian child with a blank expression
on his face sitting outside on a mechanical helicopter that
shakes when you put quarters in it? No? Well, that's what
you see at a toy store. And you must think you're in a
toy store, because you're here shopping for an infant
named Jeb.

<!-- end slipsum code -->


------------------------------5d02ba973600--

Now the question is, are there any good ways to catch the values of the filename, and the contents of the file ? Or will I have to get in some kind of regular expressions voodoo to extract the values of the content above ?

I’d like to do this without any third party module like express, first because I would like to learn how this works and second because express’ bodyParser() saves all the files to disk and then other modules like formidable have to read from disk, and I’m trying to make something that pipes the file upload directly to Rackspace CloudFiles without having to save to disk first.

Answer 1

Read through the code in Formidable (which Connect, and therefore Express, uses for handling file uploads) and use it as a starting point, modifying behaviors you don’t like (such as saving to disk).