js-untar

Library for extracting tar files in the browser. Useful when packing all your application images/sound/json/etc. data in a standard .tar file and serving to clients as one gzipped bundle.

Browser feature requirements

• Promise. (IE polyfill).
• ArrayBuffer.
• Web Workers.
• Blob and the Blob() constructor.

As of September 2015 this includes Chrome>=20, Firefox>=13, IE>=10, Opera>=12.10 and Safari>=8. Web Worker transferable objects are used when available, increasing speed greatly. This is supported in Chrome>=21, Firefox>=18, Opera>=15 and Safari.

Web Workers are not implemented in Node.js, so js-untar is not Node-compatible. Use a Node-compatible library such as tar-stream.

Installation

NPM

npm install js-untar

Documentation

Supports AMD, CommonJS or simply load with a script tag, which will provide a global untar function. The module is a function that returns a modified Promise with a progress callback. This callback is executed every time a file is extracted. The standard Promise.then method is also called when extraction is done, with all extracted files as argument. The extraction is done in a Web Worker to allow the main UI thread to continue.

Example:

import untar from "js-untar";

// Load the source ArrayBuffer from a XMLHttpRequest (or any other way you may need).
var sourceBuffer = [...];

untar(sourceBuffer)
.progress(function(extractedFile) {
    ... // Do something with a single extracted file.
})
.then(function(extractedFiles) {
    ... // Do something with all extracted files.
});

// or

untar(sourceBuffer).then(
    function(extractedFiles) { // onSuccess
        ... // Do something with all extracted files.
    },
    function(err) { // onError
        ... // Handle the error.
    },
    function(extractedFile) { // onProgress
        ... // Do something with a single extracted file.
    }
);

File object

The returned file object(s) has the following properties. Most of these are explained in the Tar wikipedia entry.

• name = The full filename (including path and ustar filename prefix).
• mode
• uid
• gid
• size
• mtime
• checksum
• type
• linkname
• ustarFormat
• buffer An ArrayBuffer with the contents of the file.
• blob A Blob object with the contents of the file.

• getBlobUrl() A unique ObjectUrl to the data can be retrieved with this method for easy usage of extracted data in <img> tags etc.

      document.getElementById("targetImageElement").src = file.getBlobUrl();

• readAsString() Parse the file contents as a UTF-8 string.
• readAsJSON() Parse the file contents as a JSON object.

If the .tar file was in the ustar format (which most are), the following properties are also defined:

• version
• uname
• gname
• devmajor
• devminor
• namePrefix

Additional vendor-specific PAX header fields might also be defined.