How to Read Files in JavaScript using the FileReader API
2 min readSep 7, 2022
What API do you use to read a file?
The FileReader API.
The File API allows interaction with single, multiple as well as BLOB files. The FileReader API can be used to read a file asynchronously in collaboration with JavaScript event handling. However, all the browsers do not have HTML 5 support so it is important to test the browser compatibility before using the File API.
What are the four inbuilt methods in the FileReader API to read local files?
- FileReader.readAsArrayBuffer(): Reads the contents of the specified input file. The result attribute contains an ArrayBuffer representing the file’s data.
- FileReader.readAsBinaryString(): Reads the contents of the specified input file. The result attribute contains the raw binary data from the file as a string.
- FileReader.readAsDataURL(): Reads the contents of the specified input file. The result attribute contains a URL representing the file’s data.
- FileReader.readAsText(): Reads the contents of the specified input file. The result attribute contains the contents of the file as a text string. This method can take encoding version as the second argument(if required). The default…