I have a file and its structure is like this:
({
foo: 'bar',
bar: 'foo'
})
I'm trying to load and read the file in NodeJS so that I can get the object as a variable; what's the best way to do this? Note that I can't change the file's structure.
You could read the file into a string and eval that string:
var fs = require('fs');
var s = fs.readFileSync('myfile.js', 'utf8');
var x = eval(s);
If necessary, you could modify the string s before calling eval.
I have to agree with mtsr that a solution using JSON.parse is better (both in terms of security and probably performance as well). However, the current data file does not represent a JSON structure due to the extra parenthesis surrounding the object literal.
if you are certain that the object literal {..} is always surrounded by a (..) pair, you can remove them and then attempt to parse the string:
m = s.match(/\(([\s\S]+)\)/);
x = JSON.parse(m[1]);
The [\s\S]+ part of the regexp, matches anything including newline characters. The \( and \) part matches the surrounding parenthesis.
eval, I was hoping to avoid this since my coworkers would probably laugh, taunt and generally make jokes about me for the rest of the project!
JSON.parse() cannot handle the extra parenthesis. Of course, if this is the problem, one could manually strip them from the string and then process the result through JSON.parse().I would avoid eval. Try
JSON.parse()
instead.
JSON.parse(({ foo: 'bar', bar: 'foo' })), it reports an error :(