How to read from stdin line by line in Node

Question

I'm looking to process a text file with node using a command line call like:

node app.js < input.txt

Each line of the file needs to be processed individually, but once processed the input line can be forgotten.

Using the on-data listener of the stdin, I get the input steam chunked by a byte size so I set this up.

process.stdin.resume();
process.stdin.setEncoding('utf8');

var lingeringLine = "";

process.stdin.on('data', function(chunk) {
    lines = chunk.split("\n");

    lines[0] = lingeringLine + lines[0];
    lingeringLine = lines.pop();

    lines.forEach(processLine);
});

process.stdin.on('end', function() {
    processLine(lingeringLine);
});

But this seems so sloppy. Having to massage around the first and last items of the lines array. Is there not a more elegant way to do this?

Answer 1

You can use the readline module to read from stdin line by line:

var readline = require('readline');
var rl = readline.createInterface({
  input: process.stdin,
  output: process.stdout,
  terminal: false
});

rl.on('line', function(line){
    console.log(line);
})

Answer 2

readline is specifically designed to work with terminal (that is process.stdin.isTTY === true). There are a lot of modules which provide split functionality for generic streams, like split. It makes things super-easy:

process.stdin.pipe(require('split')()).on('data', processLine)

function processLine (line) {
  console.log(line + '!')
}

Answer 3

// Work on POSIX and Windows
var stdinBuffer = fs.readFileSync(0); // STDIN_FILENO = 0
console.log(stdinBuffer.toString());

Answer 4

#!/usr/bin/env node

const EventEmitter = require('events');

function stdinLineByLine() {
  const stdin = new EventEmitter();
  let buff = "";

  process.stdin
    .on('data', data => {
      buff += data;
      lines = buff.split(/[\r\n|\n]/);
      buff = lines.pop();
      lines.forEach(line => stdin.emit('line', line));
    })
    .on('end', () => {
      if (buff.length > 0) stdin.emit('line', buff);
    });

  return stdin;
}

const stdin = stdinLineByLine();
stdin.on('line', console.log);

Answer 5

shareing for others:

read stream line by line,should be good for large files piped into stdin, my version:

var n=0;
function on_line(line,cb)
{
    ////one each line
    console.log(n++,"line ",line);
    return cb();
    ////end of one each line
}

var fs = require('fs');
var readStream = fs.createReadStream('all_titles.txt');
//var readStream = process.stdin;
readStream.pause();
readStream.setEncoding('utf8');

var buffer=[];
readStream.on('data', (chunk) => {
    const newlines=/[\r\n]+/;
    var lines=chunk.split(newlines)
    if(lines.length==1)
    {
        buffer.push(lines[0]);
        return;
    }   

    buffer.push(lines[0]);
    var str=buffer.join('');
    buffer.length=0;
    readStream.pause();

    on_line(str,()=>{
        var i=1,l=lines.length-1;
        i--;
        function while_next()
        {
            i++;
            if(i<l)
            {
                return on_line(lines[i],while_next);
            }
            else
            {
                buffer.push(lines.pop());
                lines.length=0;
                return readStream.resume();
            }
        }
        while_next();
    });
  }).on('end', ()=>{
      if(buffer.length)
          var str=buffer.join('');
          buffer.length=0;
        on_line(str,()=>{
            ////after end
            console.error('done')
            ////end after end
        });
  });
readStream.resume();

Answer 6

In my case the program (elinks) returned lines that looked empty, but in fact had special terminal characters, color control codes and backspace, so grep options presented in other answers did not work for me. So I wrote this small script in Node.js. I called the file tight, but that's just a random name.

#!/usr/bin/env node

function visible(a) {
    var R  =  ''
    for (var i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
        if (a[i] == '\b') {  R -= 1; continue; }  
        if (a[i] == '\u001b') {
            while (a[i] != 'm' && i < a.length) i++
            if (a[i] == undefined) break
        }
        else R += a[i]
    }
    return  R
}

function empty(a) {
    a = visible(a)
    for (var i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
        if (a[i] != ' ') return false
    }
    return  true
}

var readline = require('readline')
var rl = readline.createInterface({ input: process.stdin, output: process.stdout, terminal: false })

rl.on('line', function(line) {
    if (!empty(line)) console.log(line) 
})