How to Detect the Line Endings of a Text File in Node.js

Line endings are represented differently on Mac, Windows & Unix. Thankfully, there’s a way we can easily check what type of endings we’re dealing with before we use text files on our system.

Using the below code, we can take advantage of a free API that detects & returns the line endings for any given text file. This will identify the primary newline type & the primary newline terminator in the response body, as well as the total input length.

We can begin structuring our API call by first installing the SDK. We can either run the following command:

npm install cloudmersive-convert-api-client --save

Or we can add the following snippet to our package.json:

  "dependencies": {
    "cloudmersive-convert-api-client": "^2.6.3"
  }

Then we can include the below code in our file to make our request. We can authorize our API call with a free-tier API key (this allows 800 API calls per month with no commitments):

var CloudmersiveConvertApiClient = require('cloudmersive-convert-api-client');
var defaultClient = CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.ApiClient.instance;

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
var Apikey = defaultClient.authentications['Apikey'];
Apikey.apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';



var apiInstance = new CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.EditTextApi();

var inputFile = Buffer.from(fs.readFileSync("C:\\temp\\inputfile").buffer); // File | Input file to perform the operation on.


var callback = function(error, data, response) {
  if (error) {
    console.error(error);
  } else {
    console.log('API called successfully. Returned data: ' + data);
  }
};
apiInstance.editTextDetectLineEndings(inputFile, callback);

Now we can quickly identify line endings and make necessary changes so external files can display correctly on our OS.