Display currentsong from text file, how?

[ShadowOps]

Hello all.

First of all, thank you for the bot. I got the bot running and the !test command is working 👍
Is it possible to display the current song playing with a command? Since i have no programming knowledge i just tried my best and came up with this:

var fs = require('fs');
var myReadStream = fs.createReadStream(__dirname + '/trackinfo.txt', 'utf8');

myReadStream.on('data', function(chunk){
	
	console.log(chunk);
});

^ No problem here, it shows the current song playing in the console.

After that i tried combine the !test command with my code but that didn't work, hehe.

var fs = require('fs');
var myReadStream = fs.createReadStream(_dirname + '/trackinfo.txt', 'utf8');

Bot.on('join', () => {

  Bot.on('message', chatter => {
    if(chatter.message === '!currentsong'){ 
	myReadStream.on('data', function(chunk){
	
	console.log(chunk);
});

It keeps popping out syntax errors... Could you point me out how to fix this and is this even possible to do? Thanks in advance

[kritzware]

Hi, I'm glad you like it 😄

There are a couple of syntax errors with your provided code, such as missing brackets and the _dirname variable being undefined (it should have two underscores e.g. __dirname). The correct version looks like this:

var myReadStream = fs.createReadStream(__dirname + '/trackinfo.txt', 'utf8')

Bot.on('join', () => {
    Bot.on('message', chatter => {
        if(chatter.message === '!currentsong') { 
	        myReadStream.on('data', chunk => {
                console.log(chunk)
            })
        }
    })
})

I would probably do what you want this way though, making use of the readFileSync method.

const FILEPATH = __dirname + '/trackinfo.txt'

Bot.on('join', () => {

  Bot.on('message', chatter => {
    if(chatter.message === '!test') {
        const track = fs.readFileSync(FILEPATH).toString()
        if(track) {
            Bot.say(`Current track playing is ${track}`)
        }
    }
  })
})

If you're familiar with the concepts of Asynchronous code and Promises in Javascript, it would be better to wrap the file read in a promise function that resolves when the file has been read, e.g.

Bot.on('join', () => {

  Bot.on('message', async chatter => {
    if(chatter.message === '!test') {
        try {
            const track = await getTrack()
            Bot.say(`Current song playing is ${track}`)
        } catch(err) {
            console.log('error retrieving track name!')
        }
    }
  })
})

function getTrack() {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        fs.readFile(FILEPATH, (err, data) => {
            if(err) reject(err)
            else resolve(data)
        })
    })
}

Note: I am currently using Node v8.4.0 for these examples

[ShadowOps]

It is working! Thank you so much. Is Codecademy a good website to learn how to code?

[kritzware]

Codecademy is a good place to start and learn the basics. The best approach I found for learning to code was by just working on my own projects and googling/reading about stuff I didn't understand, or know how to do 👍