File.read() returns nothing for .txt file

[oystersauces]

Hi,

I'm searching a way to read (and subsequently edit) the contents of a text file on my disk. I thought it works with the File.read() function but when I run the following I get nothing from the file. How does it work? How do I get the string with the file content? I tried different functions like readln() etc but with no luck

	var testtextfile = File("/c/users/bernhard-büro/desktop/text.txt");
	testtextfile.open("r", undefined, undefined); //also tried with .open("r"); and .open('r');
	var fileContentsString = testtextfile.read();

	alert("Full path: "+testtextfile.fsName+"\r\n"+
	"File content:"+fileContentsString+"\r\n"+
	"fileContentsString length:"+fileContentsString.length);
	testtextfile.close();

this is the result: (and what is the proper way to format code in this forum?)

Thank you very much!
Cheers

[tpk1982]

Please try this..

var testtextfile = new File("/c/users/bernhard-büro/desktop/text.txt");

testtextfile.open('r');

fileContentsString = testtextfile.readln();

alert("File content:"+fileContentsString);

[Trevor: · Accepted solution]

Often the cause is encoding related.

Try

var testtextfile = File("/c/users/bernhard-büro/desktop/text.txt");
testtextfile.encoding = 'UTF8'; // set to 'UTF8' or 'UTF-8'
testtextfile.open("r");
var fileContentsString = testtextfile.read();
testtextfile.close();
alert("Full path: " + testtextfile.fsName + "\r\n" +
    "File content:" + fileContentsString + "\r\n" +
    "fileContentsString length:" + fileContentsString.length);

To format the code you go to advanced editor

and then

HTH

Trevor

[oystersauces]

Hi Trevor, thanks a lot for that. I still have to find out what exactly is going on in detail about the character encoding on my system (changing it doesn't seem to be necessary in most cases) but now I can parse the text out of my file, great! Kind regards, Stefan

[Trevor:]

Hi Stefan

The need for the encoding is dependent on the contents of the file.

If the files contains just asci then you shouldn't need to set it. ü and most of the diacritics are asci extended and also shouldn't need setting but if the text contains Unicode characters you are generally going to need to set it.

Trevor  

[Peter Kahrel]

So it's safer always to set the encoding to UTF-8.

[Peter Kahrel]

Apart from the encoding, another problem might be the u+umlaut in your filename. If Trevor's suggestion doesn't help, rename the file so that its name doesn't have any accented characters, then try again.

[Laubender]

Hi Peter,

about the u umlaut problem:
I've seen this on Mac OS X where a ü in a file name can be composed out of:

u\u0308

Could that happen on Windows as well?

Regards,
Uwe

[Peter Kahrel]

> Could that happen on Windows as well?

No, it doesn't. One of the few areas where Windows behaves better than the Mac OSs

[Loic.Aigon]

Hi

I second that. I discovered that recently while resolving image files instance on Mac Os. I got a textual reference with a diacritic such as "marché.jpg" and the file couldn't be found to my surprise. I coudl see the file but using File ("marché.jpg").exists would return false.

Fact is Mac os was using "marche[diacritic].jpg"

Painful indeed.

[Trevor:]

Unless you need to use UTF-16 like I did yesterday 😉

[Peter Kahrel]

Fair point!

[Jongware]

If that was indeed the case: A very basic check to see if the file is opened succesfully would have shown that.

[oystersauces]

Hi Peter, thanks for your answer. Taking the umlaut out of my filepath did not help. However, I still think it might be part of the problem because why else did changing the encoding setting help when usually it works well without? But this is a wild guess, I will still look into it and post it here if I can find out something relevant. regards