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FileSystemEntry: toURL() method

files/en-us/web/api/filesystementry/tourl/index.md

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{{APIRef("File and Directory Entry API")}}{{Deprecated_Header}}{{Non-standard_Header}}

The {{domxref("FileSystemEntry")}} interface's method toURL() creates and returns a string containing a URL which can be used to identify the file system entry. This is done by exposing a new URL scheme—filesystem:—that can be used as the value of src and href attributes.

Syntax

js-nolint
toURL()
toURL(mimeType)

Parameters

  • mimeType {{optional_inline}}
    • : An optional string specifying the MIME type to use when interpreting the file. This can be used to help deal with files whose types aren't recognized automatically by the user agent. If this parameter is omitted, the user agent uses its standard algorithms to identify the file.

Return value

A string containing a URL that can then be used as a document reference in HTML content, or an empty string if the URL can't be generated (such as if the file system implementation doesn't support toURL()).

Examples

If you have a {{domxref("FileSystemFileEntry")}} corresponding to an image file in a file system available to your website or app, you can call toURL() to get its URL for use in HTML. If your site is located at http://my-awesome-website.woot, and you have a temporary file system that contains an image file named awesome-sauce.jpg, the URL returned by toURL() might be (depending on the browser's implementation) something like "filesystem:http://my-awesome-website.woot/temporary/awesome-sauce.jpg".

Code that makes use of this might look like this:

js
const img = document.createElement("img");
img.src = imageFileEntry.toURL();
img.alt = "";
document.body.appendChild(img);

Assuming the scenario mentioned before the code, the result would be HTML that looks like this being appended to the end of the document:

html

Browser compatibility

{{Compat}}

See also