File object from Observable file input?

Community Help
1

Hello, I’m curious if it’s possible to access a File object in any way through Observable? In particular, I’m looking for a way to access Blob.slice() without buffering the entire file into memory at once.

The use case here is in parquet-wasm, where we’re adding support for browser File objects, allowing the user to inspect the metadata of the local file and select which portions of the file they wish to load into the browser, for e.g. data visualization.

2

You can access the File object via value._:

viewof myFile = Inputs.file()

myFile._

The implementation can be found here: inputs/src/file.js at main · observablehq/inputs · GitHub