How can I read a local file with Papa Parse?

None of these worked for me, I specifically wanted to read in a csv server side, and not client side (in the borwser). This worked for me.

async / await

const fs = require('fs');
const Papa = require('papaparse');

const csvFilePath = 'data/test.csv'

// Function to read csv which returns a promise so you can do async / await.

const readCSV = async (filePath) => {
  const csvFile = fs.readFileSync(filePath)
  const csvData = csvFile.toString()  
  return new Promise(resolve => {
    Papa.parse(csvData, {
      header: true,
      complete: results => {
        console.log('Complete', results.data.length, 'records.'); 
        resolve(results.data);
      }
    });
  });
};

const test = async () => {
  let parsedData = await readCSV(csvFilePath); 
}

test()

If you don't want promise / async, await then you can use this.

callback

const fs = require('fs');
const Papa = require('papaparse');

const csvFilePath = 'data/test.csv'

const file = fs.createReadStream(csvFilePath);

var csvData=[];
Papa.parse(file, {
  header: true,
  step: function(result) {
    csvData.push(result.data)
  },
  complete: function(results, file) {
    console.log('Complete', csvData.length, 'records.'); 
  }
});

---

Note header: true is an option on the config, see docs for other options

The File API suggested by papaparse's docs is meant for browser used. Assuming that you are running this on node at server side, what works for me is leveraging the readable stream:

const fs = require('fs');
const papa = require('papaparse');
const file = fs.createReadStream('challenge.csv');
var count = 0; // cache the running count
papa.parse(file, {
    worker: true, // Don't bog down the main thread if its a big file
    step: function(result) {
        // do stuff with result
    },
    complete: function(results, file) {
        console.log('parsing complete read', count, 'records.'); 
    }
});

There may be an easier interface, but so far this works quite well and offer the option of streaming for processing large files.