Write objects into file with Node.js
Building on what deb2fast said I would also pass in a couple of extra parameters to JSON.stringify() to get it to pretty format:
fs.writeFileSync('./data.json', JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2) , 'utf-8');
The second param is an optional replacer function which you don't need in this case so null
works.
The third param is the number of spaces to use for indentation. 2 and 4 seem to be popular choices.
If you're geting [object object]
then use JSON.stringify
fs.writeFile('./data.json', JSON.stringify(obj) , 'utf-8');
It worked for me.
In my experience JSON.stringify is slightly faster than util.inspect. I had to save the result object of a DB2 query as a json file, The query returned an object of 92k rows, the conversion took very long to complete with util.inspect, so I did the following test by writing the same 1000 record object to a file with both methods.
JSON.Stringify
fs.writeFile('./data.json', JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2));
Time: 3:57 (3 min 57 sec)
Result's format:
[
{
"PROB": "00001",
"BO": "AXZ",
"CNTRY": "649"
},
...
]
util.inspect
var util = require('util'); fs.writeFile('./data.json', util.inspect(obj, false, 2, false));
Time: 4:12 (4 min 12 sec)
Result's format:
[ { PROB: '00001',
BO: 'AXZ',
CNTRY: '649' },
...
]
obj
is an array in your example.
fs.writeFileSync(filename, data, [options]) requires either String
or Buffer
in the data parameter. see docs.
Try to write the array in a string format:
// writes 'https://twitter.com/#!/101Cookbooks', 'http://www.facebook.com/101cookbooks'
fs.writeFileSync('./data.json', obj.join(',') , 'utf-8');
Or:
// writes ['https://twitter.com/#!/101Cookbooks', 'http://www.facebook.com/101cookbooks']
var util = require('util');
fs.writeFileSync('./data.json', util.inspect(obj) , 'utf-8');
edit: The reason you see the array in your example is because node's implementation of console.log
doesn't just call toString
, it calls util.format
see console.js source