Read file relative

read-file-relative (GitHub: inikulin/read-file-relative, License: Unknown, npm: read-file-relative)

A problem everybody probably encounters once in a while is relativity of file paths while reading files with Node.js. You would do something like this:

var fs   = require('fs');
var path = require('path');
var data = fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, '/data-file.txt')).toString();

// Or like:
var fs   = require('fs');
var data = fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/data-file.txt').toString();

// Or even like this
var fs   = require('fs');
var data = fs.readFileSync('./data-file.txt').toString();

Now you can easily read out files without all the annoying boilerplate code. Imagine a world where you could do this:

var data = readSync('/data-file.txt');

Well you can stop imagining, because it’s here and it’s called read-file-relative. Read-file-relative comes with two main functions on it’s API: read and readSync. Let’s take a look.

To read out the file synchronously this is what you would do.

var readSync = require('read-file-relative').readSync;
var data = readSync('/file.txt');

When you prefer asynchronously reading you just provide a callback like this:

var read = require('read-file-relative').read;
read('/file.txt', 'utf8',function(err, content) {
   // ...
});

Note that for the read we need to provide the encoding else it will return a buffer.

Besides reading files you can also just convert a path to an absolute path like this:

var toAbsPath = require('read-file-relative').toAbsPath;
var absPath = toAbsPath('/file.txt');

This is a nice addition to everybody’s toolbox. It doesn’t do much, but what it does, it does very well.