This is my favorite way of going through a file, a simple native solution for a progressive (as in not a "slurp" or all-in-memory way) file read with modern async/await. It's a solution that I find "natural" when processing large text files without having to resort to the readline package or any non-core dependency.
let buf = '';
for await ( const chunk of fs.createReadStream('myfile') ) {
const lines = buf.concat(chunk).split(/\r?\n/);
buf = lines.pop() ?? '';
for( const line of lines ) {
console.log(line);
}
}
if(buf.length) console.log(buf); // last line, if file does not end with newline
You can adjust encoding in the fs.createReadStream or use chunk.toString(<arg>). Also this let's you better fine-tune the line splitting to your taste, ie. use .split(/\n+/) to skip empty lines and control the chunk size with fs.createReadStream('myfile', { highWaterMark: <chunkSize> }).
Don't forget to create a function like processLine(line) to avoid repeating the line processing code twice due to the ending buf leftover. Unfortunately, the ReadStream instance does not update its end-of-file flags in this setup, so there's no way, afaik, to detect within the loop that we're in the last iteration without some more verbose tricks like comparing the file size from a fs.Stats() with .bytesRead. Hence the final buf processing solution, unless you're absolutely sure your file ends with a newline \n, in which case the for await loop should suffice.
Performance Considerations
Chunk sizes are important for performance, the default is 64k for text files and, for multi MB files, larger chunks can improve speed by an order of magnitude.
The above snippet runs at least the same speed (or even 5% faster sometimes) as code based on NodeJS v18's fs.readLine() or based on the readline module (the accepted answer), once you tune highWaterMark to something that your machine can handle, ie. setting it to the same size as the file, if your available memory allows it, is the fastest.
In any case, any of NodeJS line-reading answers here are an order of magnitude slower than the Perl or native *Nix solutions.
Similar alternatives
★ If you prefer the evented asynchronous version, this would be it:
let buf = '';
fs.createReadStream('myfile')
.on('data', chunk => {
const lines = buf.concat(chunk).split(/\r?\n/);
buf = lines.pop();
for( const line of lines ) {
console.log(line);
}
})
.on('end', () => buf.length && console.log(buf) );
★ Now if you don't mind importing the stream core package, then this is the equivalent piped stream version, which allows for chaining transforms like gzip decompression:
const { Writable } = require('stream');
let buf = '';
fs.createReadStream('myfile').pipe(
new Writable({
write: (chunk, enc, next) => {
const lines = buf.concat(chunk).split(/\r?\n/);
buf = lines.pop();
for (const line of lines) {
console.log(line);
}
next();
}
})
).on('finish', () => buf.length && console.log(buf) );
