Reading the (text) contents of a GIF

[Athor]

Hi guys,

I am working on a script to basically insert a gif as metadata into a fx preset file. If you open Adobe bridge and browse to the After effects text presets you will see that you can click on a preset and in the preview there is an animated GIF. So I am attempting to do this for custom presets.

Basically I think I need to read the contents of a GIF file as data, or text, then encode that as base64 and insert it into the metadata of the preset file.

The problem is when I read in the GIF as data I can't seem to get all the data.

The code I'm using is

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file = new File("C:\\test.gif");
file.open("r");
test = file.read();
alert(test);

And what gets returned is

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GIF89aØ

If I open the gif in notepad I get:

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GIF89aØ   ô     ÿÿÿ–••øøøòòòìììæææàààÛÛÛÕÕÕÐÐÐÊÊÊÅÅÅ¿¿¿¸¸¸°°°¨¨¨ŸŸŸŒŒŒƒƒƒ{{{rrriii___VVVMMMCCC999///###!ÿNETSCAPE2.0   !ù ÿ ,    Ø    ÿ  Ždižhª®lë¾p,Ïtmßx®ï|ïÿÀ pH,È¤rÉl:ŸÐ¨tJ­Z¯Ø¬vËíz¿à°xL.›Ïè´zÍn»ßð¸|N¯Ûïø¼~Ïïûÿ€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬­®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿ 
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So am I doing something wrong in reading in the gif? Do I need to specify some sort of encoding?

[Athor]

If i copy the data to a txt file, and remove the "GIF89aØ" at the beginning, the rest of the data reads in fine.

So I guess javascript is getting stuck on the "GIF89aØ". Any ideas?

[lloydalvarez]

Might be a PC thing. Just tested your test script on mac and I get the full text.

-Lloyd

[Athor]

Thanks for testing it Atleast it narrows down the issue.

I've been testing it a little more and if i 'seek' to a specific byte number before reading the data, I can read parts of it in.

E.g. If I seek to byte 14 I get a portion of text up until it encounters white space. It seems whenever there is some whitespace (like directly after the GIF89a part), it stops reading it.

Maybe its a encoding issue, and I don't have the correct encoding on my system.

Would you be able to run it again with a

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alert(file.encoding);

after the read command?

[lloydalvarez]

Here you go. Have you read over the File encoding chapter in the Javascript Tools Guide CS4?

[Athor]

Yea I have read over it. I have tried to read it with a bunch of different encodings but get the same result each time.