Question

Im running a simple readfile command, for a video tutorial, and this is the code exactly as the instructor saved it…

var fs = require("fs");
console.log("Starting");
fs.readFile("./sample.txt", function(error, data) {
console.log("Contents: " + data);
});
console.log("Carry on executing");

i have the sample.txt in the same folder as this js file,
and in the sample.txt file i have “This is a sample output for this text document”,
unfortunately i get a “undefined” as the output for the data variable in the code.

If anybody has any insight as to why this is happening, it would be wonderful if someone would help….

THANKS

Answer 1

Try checking if the file exists first:

var fs = require("fs");
console.log("Starting");

fs.exists("./sample.txt", function(fileok){
  if(fileok)fs.readFile("./sample.txt", function(error, data) {
    console.log("Contents: " + data);
  });
  else console.log("file not found");
});
console.log("Carry on executing");

If it doesn’t exists, check the path, filename and extension, because your code is OK.