Writing JSON object to a JSON file with fs.writeFileSync

I am trying to write a JSON object to a JSON file. The code executes without errors, but instead of the content of the object been written, all that gets written into the JSON file is:

[object Object] 

This is the code that actually does the writing:

fs.writeFileSync('../data/phraseFreqs.json', output) 

'output' is a JSON object, and the file already exists. Please let me know if more information is required.

5 Answers

You need to stringify the object.

fs.writeFileSync('../data/phraseFreqs.json', JSON.stringify(output)); 

I don't think you should use the synchronous approach, asynchronously writing data to a file is better also stringify the output if it's an object.

Note: If output is a string, then specify the encoding and remember the flag options as well.:

const fs = require('fs'); const content = JSON.stringify(output); fs.writeFile('/tmp/phraseFreqs.json', content, 'utf8', function (err) { if (err) { return console.log(err); } console.log("The file was saved!"); }); 

Added Synchronous method of writing data to a file, but please consider your use case. Asynchronous vs synchronous execution, what does it really mean?

const fs = require('fs'); const content = JSON.stringify(output); fs.writeFileSync('/tmp/phraseFreqs.json', content); 

Make the json human readable by passing a third argument to stringify:

fs.writeFileSync('../data/phraseFreqs.json', JSON.stringify(output, null, 4)); 

When sending data to a web server, the data has to be a string (here). You can convert a JavaScript object into a string with JSON.stringify(). Here is a working example:

var fs = require('fs'); var originalNote = { title: 'Meeting', description: 'Meeting John Doe at 10:30 am' }; var originalNoteString = JSON.stringify(originalNote); fs.writeFileSync('notes.json', originalNoteString); var noteString = fs.readFileSync('notes.json'); var note = JSON.parse(noteString); console.log(`TITLE: ${note.title} DESCRIPTION: ${note.description}`); 

Hope it could help.

Here's a variation, using the version of fs that uses promises:

const fs = require('fs'); await fs.promises.writeFile('../data/phraseFreqs.json', JSON.stringify(output)); // UTF-8 is default