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I'm trying to get a grip on the file API in HTML5 for accessing local files in a browser. I found some other SO questions about this and even found a nice guide here for choosing files locally.
However, I really need to be able to access text files this way and print them on screen, like in a textarea element. Does anyone know how this is done? As an example, I would like to read in a flat text file with a single line of text and print the contents in a textarea.
Thanks for the help!
855
Try this
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Any Title</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<input type="file" id="files" name="file" /> Read bytes:
<textarea id="output"></textarea>
<script>
function handleFileSelect(evt) {
var files = document.getElementById('files').files;
if (!files.length) {
alert('Please select a file!');
return;
}
var file = files[0];
var reader = new FileReader();
reader.onloadend = function(evt) {
if (evt.target.readyState == FileReader.DONE) { // DONE == 2
document.getElementById('output').textContent = evt.target.result;
}
};
reader.readAsText(file, "UTF-8");
}
document.getElementById('files').addEventListener('change', handleFileSelect, false);
</script>
</body>
</html>
answered Dec 22 '25 23:12
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