How to read file with async/await properly?

Question

I cannot figure out how async/await works. I slightly understands it but I can\'t make it work.

Answer 1

To use await/async you need methods that return promises. The core API functions don't do that without wrappers like promisify:

const fs = require('fs');
const util = require('util');

// Convert fs.readFile into Promise version of same    
const readFile = util.promisify(fs.readFile);

function getStuff() {
  return readFile('test');
}

// Can't use `await` outside of an async function so you need to chain
// with then()
getStuff().then(data => {
  console.log(data);
})

As a note, readFileSync does not take a callback, it returns the data or throws an exception. You're not getting the value you want because that function you supply is ignored and you're not capturing the actual return value.