textfilereader

description

Lightweight package to read and use textfiles not having to handle things related to encoding.

Reason for existence

As fs.readFile is only supporting latin1, utf8 and utf16le and don't autodetect, nor autoremove the BOM, I really needed this. So I created this library during a Friday evening.

Future

Currently only synced reading are supported, but I might add asynchronous support int the future, ether if I need it myself or if someone ask (or even pay 10-50€).
But what I really hope for is that node team would get their shit together and add support for the formats this package support, it's not like it's rocket science.

Features

It detects fileformat using the BOM, It removes the BOM

Supported encodings

• utf8 - Autodetected, read using standard Buffer.toString('utf8')
• utf16le - Autodetected, read using standard Buffer.toString('utf16le')
• utf16be - Autodetected, converted to utf16le then read using standard Buffer.toString('utf16le')
• utf32le - Autodetected, trying to convert to utf16le then read using standard Buffer.toString('utf16le'), cast error if char that can't be converted is found.
• utf32be - Autodetected, trying to convert to utf16le then read using standard Buffer.toString('utf16le'), cast error if char that can't be converted is found.
• latin1 - Everything else is considered to be latin1.

Common way to read file.

const fs = require('fs');
try {
    t = fs.readFileSync('latin1.txt');
    console.log(t);
} catch (error) {
    console.log('Error: ' + error.message);
}

Using this module way to read file.

const tr = require('textfilereader');
try {
    t = tr('latin1.txt');
    console.log(t);
} catch (error) {
    console.log('Error: ' + error.message);
}