I am currently working on an application that handles a fairly large amount of data. Currently, I've hard-coded those values into the Javascript iself (defining global arrays), but this method does not seem sustainable.
Is there a way to use Javascript to parse a .txt file located in the same directory on the server? I know this question has probably been asked before, but I've only found answers pertaining to accessing system-local text files.
Here is native javascript solution without libraries.
As it's async you have to create 2 functions
one to read and another one to show/modify or whatever
function read(textFile){
var xhr=new XMLHttpRequest;
xhr.open('GET',textFile);
xhr.onload=show;
xhr.send()
}
function show(){
var pre=document.createElement('pre');
pre.textContent=this.response;
document.body.appendChild(pre)
}
read('text.txt');
if you work alot with external files i suggest also to take a look at the new
javascript classes new FileReader() and window.requestFileSystem()
where new FileReader() has now a little more support, also on mobile devices
and from what i know window.requestFileSystem() has almost no support.. but you can handle files that are various gb large.. using Chrome.
Use AJAX. I suggest encoding the file in JSON format, rather than plain text. If you use jQuery, you can then use $.getJSON('filename.txt') to read the file and parse it into a Javascript object in one operation.
