To conclude this issue, when reading from a local txt file with node_helper.js, you have to make sure the file name has a path. And then when parsing it, you can parse it easily by checking for carriage returns (\r) to see if if its a windows file. Here is a snippet of the solution:

this.rawText = fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/localTxtFile.txt').toString()
this.isWindows = (this.rawText.indexOf('\r') == -1) ? false:true
this.variable= this.rawText.split(this.isWindows ? '\r\n\r\n' : '\n\n')

@sdetweil Ok I’ll play around with it then.
Wow great. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.

@sdetweil I have emailed you the main js file, the helper, and the txt file, all as txt files. I hope you got it.
I did set a position, yes.
Where can I get the sample mm? What is the nunjuks template approach?

@sdetweil it seems to break the module and MM. Nothing shows up on the screen when I run it.
Thanks for the sample module. It’s a really helpful template that I thought MM would have given us.
It’s a simple module, but I’m just implementing its functionality in phases. At the moment I just want it to read from a local txt file, parse it into an array, and then display a chunk of text by accessing that array. So yes I’m just showing text. What is innerText? Do I just do elem.innerText(“text”)
instead of elem.innerHTML(“text”)?

I am currently creating my own MM module, but am still relatively new to the platform so I used this tutorial to help me get started: https://forum.magicmirror.builders/topic/8534/head-first-developing-mm-module-for-extreme-beginners
It mentions that the node_helper.js is able to read from local files, but I’m having trouble getting it to work.

Here’s what my node_helper.js looks like so far:

var NodeHelper = require("node_helper")
var fs = require('fs')

module.exports = NodeHelper.create({
	start: function() {
		this.rawText = fs.readFileSync('YourTrueHome.txt').toString()
		this.readIn = this.rawText.split('\r')  //array of book line by line
		this.text = this.readIn[1]
	},
socketNotificationReceived: function(notification, payload) {
	switch(notification) {
		case "DO_YOUR_JOB":
			this.sendSocketNotification("I_DID", this.text)
			break
		}
	},
})

And then in the main js file, the socket notification receiver simply reads:

socketNotificationReceived: function(notification, payload) {
		switch(notification){
			case "I_DID":
				let elem = document.getElementById("COUNT")
				elem.innerHTML = "Count: " + payload
				break
		}
	},

There is a COUNT element correctly defined in getDom: function() already.