Today I wanted to learn how to load the contents of a file from my own computer into a web browser. I did a Web search, and discovered lots of forums, tutorials and discussion groups on the topic.<\/p>\n
A number of the on-line discussions seemed to devolve into a kind of religious war, with some participants asserting that such a thing was simply impossible, and others saying that accessing a file from disk was sort of morally wrong. Apparently it goes against the spirit of the Web.<\/p>\n
One odd thing about such assertions is that they seem to have no relationship to reality. After all, if you’ve ever uploaded to a web site a document you wrote or an image you took (which nearly everyone has done by now), then you have clearly read the contents of a file from your computer into a web browser.<\/p>\n
I did find some tutorial sites on the topic, but they were all very long, with gnarly code that ran on for pages. It had seemed like such a simple question, and I was astonished to find the on-line answers to be anything but straightforward.<\/p>\n
Eventually I figured out what was going on, by assembling little bits and pieces from different places. When I was all done, the whole thing took just one line of HTML plus four lines of Javascript. For those of you who care, here they are:<\/p>\n
\n <input id=”input” type=”file”>
\n …
\n var chooser = document.getElementById(‘input’);
\n var reader = new FileReader();
\n chooser.addEventListener(‘change’, function() {reader.readAsText(this.files[0]);});
\n reader.onload = function() { fileText = this.result; }
\n<\/small> <\/p>\n
So what are all those people out there going on about? I’m starting to suspect there may be something very odd about Web programming culture.<\/p>\n
I’m just not quite sure yet what it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I wanted to learn how to load the contents of a file from my own computer into a web browser. I did a Web search, and discovered lots of forums, tutorials and discussion groups on the topic. A number of the on-line discussions seemed to devolve into a kind of religious war, with some … Continue reading “The mysteries of the internet”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12899"}],"version-history":[{"count":49,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12948,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899\/revisions\/12948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}