TIL: Reading from JSON in NodeJS

I don’t have much time as I’m currently working on my main project for work, but I wanted to take a minute to talk about reading in json files in nodejs.

All of these great info is documented in this original blog post.

For all of these examples, we’ll use a dummy json file with the following content:

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{
    "name": "test",
    "id": 1234
}

Automatically Reading JSON file

This is probably the absolute easiest way to read in a json file and make it a useable object. All you need to do is simply require the file and assign it to a variable:

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var obj = require('./sample.json');

console.log(obj.name);

Using file system

The other way is by using the file system fs module. This requires many more steps for the same result:

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const fs = require('fs');

let contents = fs.readFileSync("./sample.json");
let jsonContent = JSON.parse(contents);

console.log(jsonContent.name);

💚