Question

I’m using Node.exe in the following file structure

Node/
  node.exe
  index.js
  /view
     index.html

When running the following code:

  var html;
  fs.readFileSync('/view/index.html', function(err, data) { 
    if(err){
      throw err;
    }   
    html = data;  
  });

I get the following error:

Error: ENOENT, The system cannot find the file specified. '/view/index.html'

Can you see what’s causing the error? I’m quite new to node.js.

Additional information:
I’m running Windows 7 64 bit, up to date version of node.exe.

I’ve found the solution!

When node.exe is run through cmd the default directory for node.exe is user…. that’s where I was going wrong, it wa using a different directory to where the node.exe is located.

Answer 1

Few things:

• You should resolved the relative path first to real path and try reading the file.
• Read the file asynchronously to get the callback
• Relative path should be corrected. The “./view/index.html” in my code is the path relative to where you start your node.js engine.

Rough code will be:

        // get real path from relative path
        fs.realpath('./view/index.html', function(err, resolvedPath) {
            // pass the resolved path to read asynchronously
            fs.readFile(resolvedPath, function(err, data) { 
                // assign the variable per your use case
                html = data;
            })
        });

Note that I am using version 4.11 (latest stable version)