Node.js get file extension

Question

Im creating a file upload function in node.js with express 3.

I would like to grab the file extension of the image. so i can rename the file and then append the file

Answer 1

I do think mapping the Content-Type header in the request will also work. This will work even for cases when you upload a file with no extension. (when filename does not have an extension in the request)

Assume you are sending your data using HTTP POST:

POST /upload2 HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:7098
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 1047799
Accept: */*
Origin: http://localhost:63342
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML,    like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.106 Safari/537.36
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----   WebKitFormBoundaryPDULZN8DYK3VppPp
Referer: http://localhost:63342/Admin/index.html? _ijt=3a6a054pasorvrljf8t8ea0j4h
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,az;q=0.6,tr;q=0.4
Request Payload
------WebKitFormBoundaryPDULZN8DYK3VppPp
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="image"; filename="blob"
Content-Type: image/png


------WebKitFormBoundaryPDULZN8DYK3VppPp--

Here name Content-Type header contains the mime type of the data. Mapping this mime type to an extension will get you the file extension :).

Restify BodyParser converts this header in to a property with name type

File {
  domain: 
   Domain {
     domain: null,
     _events: { .... },
     _eventsCount: 1,
     _maxListeners: undefined,
     members: [ ... ] },
  _events: {},
  _eventsCount: 0,
  _maxListeners: undefined,
  size: 1047621,
  path: '/tmp/upload_2a4ac9ef22f7156180d369162ef08cb8',
  name: 'blob',
  **type: 'image/png'**,
  hash: null,
  lastModifiedDate: Wed Jul 20 2016 16:12:21 GMT+0300 (EEST),
  _writeStream: 
  WriteStream {
   ... },
     writable: true,
     domain: 
     Domain {
        ...
     },
      _events: {},
      _eventsCount: 0,
     _maxListeners: undefined,
     path: '/tmp/upload_2a4ac9ef22f7156180d369162ef08cb8',
     fd: null,
     flags: 'w',
     mode: 438,
     start: undefined,
     pos: undefined,
     bytesWritten: 1047621,
     closed: true } 
}

You can use this header and do the extension mapping (substring etc ...) manually, but there are also ready made libraries for this. Below two were the top results when i did a google search

• mime
• mime-types

and their usage is simple as well:

 app.post('/upload2', function (req, res) {
  console.log(mime.extension(req.files.image.type));
 }

above snippet will print png to console.