Javascript: Uploading a File... Without a File

Javascript: Uploading a file... without a file

Why not just use XMLHttpRequest() with POST?

function beginQuoteFileUnquoteUpload(data)
{
    var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xhr.open("POST", "http://www.mysite.com/myuploadhandler.php", true);
    xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
    xhr.onreadystatechange = function ()
    {
        if (xhr.readyState == 4 && xhr.status == 200)
            alert("File uploaded!");
    }
    xhr.send("filedata="+encodeURIComponent(data));
}

The handler script at the server just writes the file data to a file.

EDIT
File upload is still a http post with a different content type. You can use this content type and separate your content with boundaries:

function beginQuoteFileUnquoteUpload(data)
{
    // Define a boundary, I stole this from IE but you can use any string AFAIK
    var boundary = "---------------------------7da24f2e50046";
    var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
    var body = '--' + boundary + '\r\n'
             // Parameter name is "file" and local filename is "temp.txt"
             + 'Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file";'
             + 'filename="temp.txt"\r\n'
             // Add the file's mime-type
             + 'Content-type: plain/text\r\n\r\n'
             + data + '\r\n'
             + boundary + '--';

    xhr.open("POST", "http://www.mysite.com/myuploadhandler.php", true);
    xhr.setRequestHeader(
        "Content-type", "multipart/form-data; boundary="+boundary

    );
    xhr.onreadystatechange = function ()
    {
        if (xhr.readyState == 4 && xhr.status == 200)
            alert("File uploaded!");
    }
    xhr.send(body);
}

If you want to send additional data, you just separate each section with a boundary and describe the content-disposition and content-type headers for each section. Each header is separated by a newline and the body is separated from the headers by an additional newline. Naturally, uploading binary data in this fashion would be slightly more difficult :-)

Further edit: forgot to mention, make sure whatever boundary string isn't in the text "file" that you're sending, otherwise it will be treated as a boundary.

Reading Files In JavaScript Without Uploading Them

You can use the JavaScript FileReader object to read the contents of a file the user selects.

The user will first have to select a file, like if they would want to upload it, and then you can use that information to read the contents of that file.

There are a few nice examples here about how to do that with similar use cases.

File upload with Javascript without user intervention

You can't do this without under intervention, this would he a huge security hole. Think about visiting a webpage and it being able to grab and upload any of your files without you doing a thing...you can see how this would be abused really fast.

You might be able to do this with a Firefox extension, I'm not sure of the security limitations it imposes (though I wouldn't be surprised if it disallowed this as well), but JavaScript would not be an option here.

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