LEARN NODE.JS Readable Streams

LEARN NODE.JS

Readable Streams

In the previous exercise, we practiced reading the contents of entire files into our JavaScript programs. In more realistic scenarios, data isn’t processed all at once but rather sequentially, piece by piece, in what is known as a stream. Streaming data is often preferable since you don’t need enough RAM to process all the data at once nor do you need to have all the data on hand to begin processing it.

One of the simplest uses of streams is reading and writing to files line-by-line. To read files line-by-line, we can use the .createInterface() method from the readline core module. .createInterface() returns an EventEmitter set up to emit 'line' events:

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

const myInterface = readline.createInterface({
  input: fs.createReadStream('text.txt')
});

myInterface.on('line', (fileLine) => {
  console.log(`The line read: ${fileLine}`);
});

Let’s walk through the above code:

• We require in the readline and fs core modules.
• We assign to myInterface the returned value from invoking readline.createInterface() with an object containing our designated input.
• We set our input to fs.createReadStream('text.txt') which will create a stream from the text.txt file.
• Next we assign a listener callback to execute when line events are emitted. A 'line' event will be emitted after each line from the file is read.
• Our listener callback will log to the console 'The line read: [fileLine]', where [fileLine] is the line just read.

Let’s practice making a readable stream.