Export SVG as a String

[iLLMonkey]

I'd like to manipulare the current document as a SVG. I could export it to the harddrive and then open/read it in from the .jsx to store it as a string. But maybe there's a shortcut to store it directly as a string without saving it to the harddrive first? Probably not, but you guys sometimes har creative solutions to virtually anything =).

Thanks!

[GNDGN · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, there is no way around passing a valid file path to the File() constructor.

This would be the quickest method that I'm aware of:

var svgContent = "";
var f = new File("/path/to/your.svg");

app.activeDocument.exportFile(f, ExportType.SVG, new ExportOptionsSVG());

f.open("r");

while (!f.eof) {
    svgContent += f.readln();
}

f.close();

alert(svgContent);

[iLLMonkey]

Yes, that seem to be the best/shortest way of doing it, thanks.

Just curious, is there any upsides using the while loop to read lines rather than just:

svgContent = f.read();

[GNDGN]

No. Both ways lead flawlessly to Rome. 😉

[m1b]

Hi @iLLMonkey, just for some extra information, you can parse the SVG string into XML, which provides some conveniences. Here's a random example of setting the "font-family" attribute on every element:

var xml = new XML(svgContent),
    elements = xml.descendants(),
    len = elements.length();

for (var i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    var found = elements[i]['@font-family'].toString();
    if (found)
        elements[i]['@font-family'] = 'Veneer';
}

 - Mark

P.S. @GNDGN, you probably already know this, but you read a file's contents in one go like this:

// read the whole file contents
var svgContent = f.read();

[iLLMonkey]

That's a very good example, thanks!