In Node.js, reading a directory of .html files and searching for element attributes inside them?

Question

I can't even begin to think about how this would be done. Basically, imagine a folder and it has a static website in it. It has all the images, styles and html files etc. With my Node application, I want to look inside this folder, get just the .html files only and then pick just the .html files that have the attribute 'data-template="home"' inside them.

I know this seems a little odd maybe, but it's for a project that requires the user to upload their static website files and then my Node app does things to them files.

Anyhow, was just curious about iterating over certain filetypes and then looking inside them... Any help with approaching this would really help me.

Many thanks, James

Solution 1

This piece of code will scan for all files in a directory, then read the contents of .html files and then look for a string data-template="home" in them.

var fs = require('fs');

fs.readdir('/path/to/html/files', function(err, files) {
    files
         .filter(function(file) { return file.substr(-5) === '.html'; })
         .forEach(function(file) { fs.readFile(file, 'utf-8', function(err, contents) { inspectFile(contents); }); });
});

function inspectFile(contents) {
    if (contents.indexOf('data-template="home"') != -1) {
        // do something
    }
}

If you need more flexibility, you could also use the cheerio module to look for an element in the html file with that attribute:

var cheerio = require('cheerio');

function inspectFile(contents) {
    var $ = cheerio.load(contents);

    if ($('html[data-template="home"]').length) {
        // do something
    }
}

Solution 2

Take a look at the nodejs filesystem module

http://nodejs.org/docs/v0.5.3/api/fs.html

You could use fs.readdir() to get the names of all the files, then read the .html ones to find 'data-template=home'.

Comments

[littlejim84]

Never thought in a million years it would be that easy. Many thanks! What a great response! Thank you.

[Zhe Hu]

very helpful. just to point out a little bug in the original code, it should be fs.readFile('/path/to/html/files'+'/'+file, 'utf-8', .....

[loverboy]

Instead of file.substr(-5), why not using path.extname(file)?

[Alcides Queiroz]

All right... Obviously, I'll have to respect your formatting preferences. Sorry for touching your code, but... I fixed a syntax error (an unexpected ')' after '.html'), and you reintroduced it with your rollback. Please pay more attention next time.