Use fse.readFile() inside .map()

Question

I am trying to read the contents of several files in Node.js using promises. Since the standard

fs

module does not provide a sufficient promise interface, I decided to use

fs-extra

instead which provides pretty much the same functions as the default

fs

module with an additional promise interface.

Reading the contents of a single file as shown below works as desired and logs the file's contents to the console:

const fse = require('fs-extra')



const filePath = './foo.txt'





fse.readFile(filePath, 'utf8')

    .then(filecontents => {

        return filecontents

    })

    .then(filecontents => {

        console.log(filecontents)

    })

However, I need to handle several files inside a given directory. To do this I need to implement the following steps:

get an array of all files inside the directory using
fse.readdir()
- done

join filenames and directory name to get a kind of a base file path using
path.join
with
.map()
to avoid iterating over the array - done

read file contents using
fse.readFile()
inside another
.map()

These three steps are implemented as follows:

const fse = require('fs-extra');

const path = require('path');



const mailDirectory = './mails'





fse.readdir(mailDirectory)

    .then(filenames => {

        return filenames.map(filename => path.join(mailDirectory, filename))

    })

    .then(filepaths => {

        // console.log(filepaths)

        return filepaths

            .map(filepath => fse.readFile(filepath).then(filecontents => {

                return filecontents

            }))

    })

    .then(mailcontents => {

        console.log(mailcontents)

    })

As stated above, steps 1 and 2 are working quite nice. However, I am unable to read the file contents using

fse.readFile()

inside the last

.map()

which results in an

[ Promise { <pending> },

  Promise { <pending> },

  Promise { <pending> },

  Promise { <pending> },

  Promise { <pending> } ]

output indicating that the promise is not resolved, yet. I assume that this unresolved promise is the promise returned by the

fse.readFile()

function. However I am unable to resolve it properly since a comparable approach in my very first snippet works like a charm.

How could I solve this issue? Where does it exactly come from since I am a newbie in the field of JS and especially in the field of Node.js?

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Answer 1

You have an Array of Promises. You should wait on them using Promise.all():

const fse = require('fs-extra');
const path = require('path');

const mailDirectory = './mails'


fse.readdir(mailDirectory)
    .then(filenames => {
        return filenames.map(filename => path.join(mailDirectory, filename))
    })
    .then(filepaths => {
        // console.log(filepaths)
        return filepaths
            .map(filepath => fse.readFile(filepath).then(filecontents => {
                return filecontents
            }))
    })
    // Promise.all consumes an array of promises, and returns a 
    // new promise that will resolve to an array of concrete "answers"
    .then(mailcontents => Promise.all(mailcontents))
    .then(realcontents => {
        console.log(realcontents)
    });

Also, if you don't want to have to have an additional dependency on fs-extra you can use node 8's new util.promisify() to make fs follow a Promise oriented API.

Use fse.readFile() inside .map()

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