passing data from a file upload

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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())

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

cyberfox;1186706 wrote:
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