Brian Grinstead

I am working on project that needs to read local files. This relies on the FileReader interface, and I couldn’t find any JavaScript libraries to help out with common usage for this, so I made one.

View the project page and demo for the FileReader.js JavaScript FileReader Plugin!

FileReader is a JavaScript interface that allows you to read local files as binary. This is available in supported browsers when a user drags and drops files into a browser window or selects files from an input with a type of file. See the FileReader specification for more information.

filereader.js is a wrapper for accessing this functionality. It can be called using:

FileReaderJS.setupInput(fileInput, opts);
FileReaderJS.setupDrop(dropbox, opts);

If you use jQuery, you can access these calls with:

$("#fileInput").fileReaderJS(opts);
$("#dropbox").fileReaderJS(opts);

To see the full range of options and functionality, view the readme.

filereader.js is available under the MIT License. See the full filereader.js code or the single file raw javascript source on github.

You can see an example project using filereader.js on Instant Sprite, a browser based CSS Sprite Generator that I am working on. Try dragging images onto the body, or clicking to add multiple image files to see what is possible.

I wrote an article, Make Table Rows Sortable Using jQuery UI Sortable on the Foliotek Development Blog about a problem that I ran into when trying to set up a basic sortable table using jQuery UI. The columns would collapse down once the dragging began.

This was fixed by adjusting the helper object for the sortable function. Check out the [article][] for all the details, but here is a sample of the code if you are just looking for the solution:

// Return a helper with preserved width of cells
var fixHelper = function(e, ui) {
	ui.children().each(function() {
		$(this).width($(this).width());
	});
	return ui;
};
 
$("#sort tbody").sortable({
	helper: fixHelper
}).disableSelection();