How do you edit a text file with JavaScript?

Question

I am trying to edit a plain text file in javascript, that is in the same directory as the .js file. This is what I have right now:

var fs = require('file-system');
var userid = 247927078954074114;
fs.writeFile("./muted.txt", `${userid}\n`);

That works perfectly using the filesystem api, but what I want to do is edit the file and delete a specific user id within it. There are a bunch of user ids in the text file, and now that I can add them, I am trying to figure out how to delete one.

Use a database...will be simpler in the long run – charlietfl Dec 27 '16 at 03:41 — charlietfl, Dec 27 '16 at 03:41
Reopened the question. You could have pinged me here. – Praveen Kumar Purushothaman Dec 27 '16 at 16:38 — Praveen Kumar Purushothaman, Dec 27 '16 at 16:38

score -1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 27 '16 at 17:09

Read the file into a buffer variable.
Search and delete the entry. A simple way of doing that would be to split the buffer into an array of strings (the separator here seems to be a newline character), iterate over the array to find and remove the corresponding entry and join back the array's strings together into your buffer. Alternatively, you could be using a regular expression to remove the entry directly in the buffer but it's less robust / more error prone.
Write the buffer back to the file.

How do you edit a text file with JavaScript?

1 Answers1