FileList

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since January 2020.

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.

The FileList interface represents an object of this type returned by the files property of the HTML <input> element; this lets you access the list of files selected with the <input type="file"> element. It's also used for a list of files dropped into web content when using the drag and drop API; see the DataTransfer object for details on this usage.

All <input> element nodes have a files attribute of type FileList on them which allows access to the items in this list. For example, if the HTML includes the following file input:

html
<input id="fileItem" type="file" />

The following line of code fetches the first file in the node's file list as a File object:

js
const file = document.getElementById("fileItem").files[0];

This interface was an attempt to create an unmodifiable list and only continues to be supported to not break code that's already using it. Modern APIs represent list structures using types based on JavaScript arrays, thus making many array methods available, and at the same time imposing additional semantics on their usage (such as making their items read-only).

These historical reasons do not mean that you as a developer should avoid FileList. You don't create FileList objects yourself, but you get them from APIs such as HTMLInputElement.files, and these APIs are not deprecated. However, be careful of the semantic differences from a real array.

Instance properties

length Read only

A read-only value indicating the number of files in the list.

Instance methods

item()

Returns a File object representing the file at the specified index in the file list.

Example

Logging filenames

In this example, we log the names of all the files selected by the user.

HTML

html
<input id="myfiles" multiple type="file" />
<pre class="output">Selected files:</pre>

CSS

css
.output {
  overflow: scroll;
  margin: 1rem 0;
  height: 200px;
}

JavaScript

js
const output = document.querySelector(".output");
const fileInput = document.querySelector("#myfiles");

fileInput.addEventListener("change", () => {
  for (const file of fileInput.files) {
    output.innerText += `\n${file.name}`;
  }
});

Result

Specifications

Specification
File API
# filelist-section
HTML Standard
# dom-input-files-dev

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also