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This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
Note: This feature is only available in Web Workers, except for Service Workers.
The readAsText() method of the FileReaderSync interface allows to read File or Blob objects in a synchronous way into a string. This interface is only available in workers as it enables synchronous I/O that could potentially block.
The optional parameter specifies encoding to be used (e.g., iso-8859-1 or UTF-8). If not present, the method will apply a detection algorithm for it.
A string representing the input data.
The following exceptions can be raised by this method:
NotFoundError DOMExceptionThrown if the resource represented by the DOM File or Blob cannot be found, e.g., because it has been erased.
SecurityError DOMExceptionThrown if one of the following problematic situation is detected:
Thrown if the resource cannot be read due to a permission problem, like a concurrent lock.
EncodingError DOMExceptionThrown if the resource is a data URL and exceed the limit length defined by each browser.
| File API # readAsTextSync |
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This page was last modified on Apr 3, 2025 by MDN contributors.
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