Blob

Baseline Widely available *

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

* Some parts of this feature may have varying levels of support.

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.

The Blob interface represents a blob, which is a file-like object of immutable, raw data; they can be read as text or binary data, or converted into a ReadableStream so its methods can be used for processing the data.

Blobs can represent data that isn't necessarily in a JavaScript-native format. The File interface is based on Blob, inheriting blob functionality and expanding it to support files on the user's system.

Using blobs

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To construct a Blob from other non-blob objects and data, use the Blob() constructor. To create a blob that contains a subset of another blob's data, use the slice() method. To obtain a Blob object for a file on the user's file system, see the File documentation.

The APIs accepting Blob objects are also listed in the File documentation.

Constructor

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Blob()

Returns a newly created Blob object which contains a concatenation of all of the data in the array passed into the constructor.

Instance properties

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Blob.size Read only

The size, in bytes, of the data contained in the Blob object.

Blob.type Read only

A string indicating the MIME type of the data contained in the Blob. If the type is unknown, this string is empty.

Instance methods

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Blob.arrayBuffer()

Returns a promise that resolves with an ArrayBuffer containing the entire contents of the Blob as binary data.

Blob.bytes()

Returns a promise that resolves with an Uint8Array containing the contents of the Blob.

Blob.slice()

Returns a new Blob object containing the data in the specified range of bytes of the blob on which it's called.

Blob.stream()

Returns a ReadableStream that can be used to read the contents of the Blob.

Blob.text()

Returns a promise that resolves with a string containing the entire contents of the Blob interpreted as UTF-8 text.

Examples

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Creating a blob

The Blob() constructor can create blobs from other objects. For example, to construct a blob from a JSON string:

js
const obj = { hello: "world" };
const blob = new Blob([JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2)], {
  type: "application/json",
});

Creating a URL representing the contents of a typed array

The following example creates a JavaScript typed array and creates a new Blob containing the typed array's data. It then calls URL.createObjectURL() to convert the blob into a URL.

html
<p>
  This example creates a typed array containing the ASCII codes for the space
  character through the letter Z, then converts it to an object URL. A link to
  open that object URL is created. Click the link to see the decoded object URL.
</p>

The main piece of this code for example purposes is the typedArrayToURL() function, which creates a Blob from the given typed array and returns an object URL for it. Having converted the data into an object URL, it can be used in a number of ways, including as the value of the <img> element's src attribute (assuming the data contains an image, of course).

js
function showViewLiveResultButton() {
  if (window.self !== window.top) {
    // Ensure that if our document is in a frame, we get the user
    // to first open it in its own tab or window. Otherwise, this
    // example won't work.
    const p = document.querySelector("p");
    p.textContent = "";
    const button = document.createElement("button");
    button.textContent = "View live result of the example code above";
    p.append(button);
    button.addEventListener("click", () => window.open(location.href));
    return true;
  }
  return false;
}

if (!showViewLiveResultButton()) {
  function typedArrayToURL(typedArray, mimeType) {
    return URL.createObjectURL(
      new Blob([typedArray.buffer], { type: mimeType }),
    );
  }
  const bytes = new Uint8Array(59);

  for (let i = 0; i < 59; i++) {
    bytes[i] = 32 + i;
  }

  const url = typedArrayToURL(bytes, "text/plain");
  const link = document.createElement("a");

  link.href = url;
  link.innerText = "Open the array URL";
  document.body.appendChild(link);
}

Extracting data from a blob

One way to read content from a Blob is to use a FileReader. The following code reads the content of a Blob as a typed array:

js
const reader = new FileReader();
reader.addEventListener("loadend", () => {
  // reader.result contains the contents of blob as a typed array
});
reader.readAsArrayBuffer(blob);

Another way to read content from a Blob is to use a Response. The following code reads the content of a Blob as text:

js
const text = await new Response(blob).text();

Or by using Blob.text():

js
const text = await blob.text();

By using other methods of FileReader, it is possible to read the contents of a Blob as a string or a data URL.

Specifications

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Specification
File API
# blob-section

Browser compatibility

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See also

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