passing data from a file upload

[cyberfox]

I've been googling for a few hours on this with no luck.

im wondering if its possible to have a <input type="file"> and pass that data into a variable (and then execute it as code using eval())

like

mainLevelData=document.getElementById('file1').fileContents;

or what an alternative would be to achieve this. (it has to be some kind of dialouge to choose file from)

[Laurence485]

as far as I'm aware you wont ever be able to do this as it breaches many security issues, it would be a violation of the sandbox.

[cyberfox]

actually i found something in html5. its very quirky but...

var reader = new FileReader();
function readText(){
    reader.readAsText(document.getElementById("file1").files[0]);
    document.getElementById('main').innerHTML=reader.result;
} 

<input id="file1" type="file" onChange='readText()' />

there's issues with the reader.result. here it works fine, but in other cases reader.result has returned null when called right after the readAsText function. so putting w/e instruction that calls reader.result into a setTimeout("instr", 10); would solve the issue.

Now i just wonder why it wont work in chrome. I've analyzed stuff and i can see chrome is fully compatible with the FileSystem object and the element.files[0]. I can't figure out why chrome always forget passing the value from readAsText into the reader.result value. reader.result just remains blank. urghh

[rnd me]

don't use timeouts, use events:

function readText(that){
  if(that.files && that.files[0]){
   var reader = new FileReader();
   reader.onload = function (e) {  
     document.getElementById('main').innerHTML= e.target.result; 
   };//end onload()
   reader.readAsText(that.files[0]);
  }//end if html5 filelist support
} 

<input type="file" onchange='readText(this)' />

[cyberfox]

clever solution, ill use that instead, but it still wont work in chrome:

http://localhostr.com/files/obJMYCW/readFile.html

[rnd me]

clever solution, ill use that instead, but it still wont work in chrome:

http://localhostr.com/files/obJMYCW/readFile.html

it works just fine for me. you do know that it must be viewed from an http:// url don't you?

if your address bar url doesn't begin with http, but rather with file, it won't work.
when i published the text in your linked file to the web, the demo runs just fine in chrome 15.

[cyberfox]

that explains. so only firefox can run from file:.

thnx for the help ^^