Node(10) File System, IO, Stream

Like Http, IO is non-blocking, It is also very commonly used, not as often as Http, but still good to know its funtionality.

readFile/readFileSync

fs.readFile(filename, [encoding], [callback])

The callback is passed two arguments (err, data), where data is the contents of the file.

fs.readFileSync(filename, [encoding])

return the content of the file, no callback needed.

Both of them reads a file, readFileSync read at once and readFile use asynchronous reading, so it has callback functions.

var fs = require('fs');
var filehandle = fs.readFile('data.txt', function(err, data) {
  if(err)throw err;
  console.log(data);
});

output

By default, readFile reads Buffer, to read in utf-8 format:

fs.readFile( 'data.txt', 'utf-8', function(err, data) {...}

fs.stat(path, [callback])

fs.statSync(path)

return a fs.Stats object that contains the information about the file

fs.Stats contains the methods and data about the file like last modified, size etc

fs.createReadStream(path, [options])

return a new Readable Stream object, Readable Stream and Writable Stream are inside the Stream module

Readable Stream object have the following events and methods

data - emits a Buffer or string( if encoding is set )

end - receive EOF

error

close - resource is closed

methods - pause(), resume(), 

pipe(destination, [options]) - pipes a readable stream to a writable stream

Buffer

creating buffer

new Buffer( 10 ) 

- create a buffer of size 10, uninitialized, this is the most common way of creating buffer

buffer class have many methods to read and write to a buffer

property: length

method: [] operator - to get the bite in the index

write - write the string to the buffer