I'm trying to read in a file with Coffeescript. In the same folder where I enter into the coffee repo, I have a file named hello.txt.

coffee> fs = require 'fs'
coffee> x = fs.readFile "hello.txt"
undefined
coffee> x
undefined

What am I doing wrong?

I'm trying to read in a file with Coffeescript. In the same folder where I enter into the coffee repo, I have a file named hello.txt.

coffee> fs = require 'fs'
coffee> x = fs.readFile "hello.txt"
undefined
coffee> x
undefined

What am I doing wrong?

• javascript
• node.js
• coffeescript

Share Improve this question Follow edited Feb 20, 2012 at 23:47 mu is too short 435k7171 gold badges859859 silver badges818818 bronze badges asked Feb 20, 2012 at 23:20 grauturgrautur 30.5k3434 gold badges9696 silver badges129129 bronze badges

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1 Answer 1

Sorted by: Reset to default 8

You're not passing a callback to readFile to actually read the file. See docs for further information. Generally, nodejs methods are asynchronous because of the asynchronous nature of the platform. For some of them there is a sync version. Indeed, you can read a file with the readFileSync method.