How to read file content from Discord message attachment

Other Questions Discord bot
1

I’m working on a Discord bot and need to extract data from files that users upload as attachments to messages. I found some code online but it’s not working properly.

if (msg.attachments) {
    let fileAttachment = msg.attachments.first();
    fetchFile(fileAttachment.url);
    
    var fileContent = fs.readFileSync(fileAttachment.name);
    jsonData = JSON.parse(fileContent);
}

The problem is that fetchFile() function doesn’t actually exist and I can’t figure out how to properly download the attachment first before reading it. I’ve been searching for solutions but haven’t found a working method yet. Does anyone know the correct way to handle this? I basically need to get the file data from the attachment URL and then parse it as JSON.

2

axios works great for this if you prefer it over fetch. just handle errors properly since discord attachment urls expire or fail sometimes. i wrap mine in try/catch so the bot doesn’t crash when people upload corrupted json files.

3

You’re trying to read a local file that doesn’t exist yet. You need to fetch the attachment content from the URL first. I’ve hit this exact issue before - just use fetch or axios to download the file content straight into memory without saving it locally.

Here’s what worked for me:

if (msg.attachments.size > 0) {
    const attachment = msg.attachments.first();
    const response = await fetch(attachment.url);
    const fileContent = await response.text();
    const jsonData = JSON.parse(fileContent);
}

Make sure your function is async and you have node-fetch installed if you’re using an older Node version. This downloads the file content straight into a string variable instead of trying to read from the filesystem. Way more reliable than downloading and saving the file first.