How to read an external local JSON file in JavaScript?

Question

I have saved a JSON file in my local system and created a JavaScript file in order to read the JSON file and print data out. Here is the JSON file:

{"res         


        

Answer 1

The loading of a .json file from harddisk is an asynchronous operation and thus it needs to specify a callback function to execute after the file is loaded.

function readTextFile(file, callback) {
    var rawFile = new XMLHttpRequest();
    rawFile.overrideMimeType("application/json");
    rawFile.open("GET", file, true);
    rawFile.onreadystatechange = function() {
        if (rawFile.readyState === 4 && rawFile.status == "200") {
            callback(rawFile.responseText);
        }
    }
    rawFile.send(null);
}

//usage:
readTextFile("/Users/Documents/workspace/test.json", function(text){
    var data = JSON.parse(text);
    console.log(data);
});

This function works also for loading a .html or .txt files, by overriding the mime type parameter to "text/html", "text/plain" etc.