We Keep Coding

Save a file on the harddrive with javascript

I have the following problem:
We are currently using a script to export data from CAD assemblies. This script is running in the Creo browser, which is currently IE. To access the correct directory the following code is used:
var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var f = fso.CreateTextFile(session.GetCurrentDirectory() + ComponentName + ".xml", true);
f.Write(iht.join("\n"));
f.Close();
The Creo bowser is going to be switched to Chrome. Because of this ActiveX is no longer going to work. Is there a way to archive the same result with different code in Chrome?
Creo is not supporting Chrome Plugins, so IE Tab is not an option.
Any help is greatly appreciated!!

There is a non-standard feature:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystem
But again, it is non-standard.
Edit: as written in that link, "This interface will not grant you access to the users filesystem. Instead you will have a "virtual drive" within the browser sandbox."

No. No more ActiveX.
In the past, most (auto)CAD programs came with a builtin LISP editor you could write scripts in. Maybe that is usable to rewrite the export if you find a LISP programmer.
Myself, I would install node.js on a server so you can use their file system module, which is a good replacement for the old active x object. This probably will require you to copy the files to that server though, so your current workflow might change a bit.

Unminify / Decompress JavaScript

Original Question
This maybe a stupid question but is there a way in VS 2013 to unminify JavaScript?
Just making sure we are all on the same page here.
Minify:
var flashVer=-1;if(navigator.plugins!=null&&navigator.plugins.length>0){if(navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash 2.0"]||navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash"]){var swVer2=navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash 2.0"]?"
That's just an example to make sure we all know what I'm on about. As far as I can tell there is no way to be able to do this. I have only been using VS 2013 for around 3 weeks so there is probably still stuff that is hidden to me.
If there is no way to do this within the program what is the next best thing for this?
I did see on another similar post that recommends the site http://jsbeautifier.org/ , so may have to give that ago but would make life easier if it was built into VS 2013
Thanks in advance as I know someone will be able to help me out here.
Update:
I have looked around VS 2013 and found nothing that can help me with this problem, like I said before they maybe some things I have missed (certain settings) so I guess if it cannot be done in VS what's the next best thing for the job? I seem to run into a fair amount of JS that is minifed and would like the quickest and best way to get the job done. I couple sites I have tried seem to have problems with it, is there a program I could install that would just allow me to short cut it with a hot-key or something. That would be pretty handy.
Update 2:
So I think its safe to say this cannot be done within VS2013, or for that matter at all due to missing var names and so on. So I have seen a few links and programs that allow you to format the code. Is there a way to do with within VS2013? And again if not what is the most reliable website/program that I can use to do this. Like I said I can see there have been answers and I appreciate all of them. I will be leaving this question open for a while to get more people to look at it and possibly give a better answer. Keep it up guys!
Update 3:
If anyone has any more information on this please do share. I am still looking around now and then waiting for someone to come up with something amazing for this. One day people.... One day!

The thing is that you cannot really "unminify" your code since some data was already lost - e.g. variable names. You can reformat it to more readable form though.
According to this question, since VisualStudio 2012 you can just use Ctrl+E, D keyboard shortcut
If the above is not right, there is this extension for VS 2010: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/41a0cc2f-eefd-4342-9fa9-3626855ca22a but I am not sure if it works with VS 2013
There is an extension to VisualStudio called ReSharper which can reformat javascript in a few different manners.
Also there are online formatters already mentioned in other answers (if your code is confidential, I would advise some paranoia manifested by downloading sources and using them locally).
Also you may always try to find unminified version of desired library on the interwebs
Also, there is the WebStorm IDE from JetBrains that is able to reformat JS - you may download a trial for the sole purpose of reformatting your minified scripts :)
If that's just to make debugging easier, you may want to use source maps
Also, here is a bunch of related questions:
How to automatically indent source code? <-- this is for VS2010, but it looks promising, maybe it will help you if it supports JavaScript (and it does since VS2012 according to MS support):
Ctrl+E, D - Format whole doc
Ctrl+K, Ctrl+F - Format selection
reindent(reformat) minimized jquery/javascript file in visual studio
Visual Studio 2010 can't format complex JavaScript documents
Visual Studio code formatter
how to make visual studio javascript formatting work?
I am not sure if they figured out a working way to reformat JS, but I've seen a few answers which might be helpful - I am just pasting this in here just FYI.
Added 03.06.2014:
http://www.jsnice.org/
This tool could be useful too, it even tries to infer minified names. As stated on their website:
We will rename variables and parameters to names that we learn from thousands of open source projects.

Personally I can't think of a reason to ever unminify code^:
If you're using a compiled js file (a-la google closure) and want more readable code to debug, use source maps available for well-supported libraries (speaking of jQuery, if it is served from a google CDN it already maps to the correct source)
If you're using a whitespace-only minified js file and want more readable code to debug, you could just toggle pretty print in-browser. This seems to best fit your question.
If you're using either of the above and want to modify the source code for a third-party js file, don't. Any future release will cancel out your change - instead consider one of the many patterns to extend a framework (or, perhaps, do some duck punching depending on the exact scenario.)
The other answers seem to cover the "unminification" process (maxification?) well, but it's worth making sure it's a necessary step first.
^ - Except when version control falls over, there are no backups and the only version of the file left is a minified copy in browser cache. Don't ask.

Its just a one way transformation .... sorry in normal cases you will not get something understandable back from minified JavaScript !
Make just a quick look at JQuery source for a second:
(function( window, undefined ) {
// Can't do this because several apps including ASP.NET trace
// the stack via arguments.caller.callee and Firefox dies if
// you try to trace through "use strict" call chains. (#13335)
// Support: Firefox 18+
//"use strict";
var
// The deferred used on DOM ready
readyList,
// A central reference to the root jQuery(document)
rootjQuery,
// Support: IE<10
// For `typeof xmlNode.method` instead of `xmlNode.method !== undefined`
core_strundefined = typeof undefined,
// Use the correct document accordingly with window argument (sandbox)
location = window.location,
document = window.document,
docElem = document.documentElement,
// Map over jQuery in case of overwrite
_jQuery = window.jQuery,
// Map over the $ in case of overwrite
_$ = window.$,
// [[Class]] -> type pairs
class2type = {},
// List of deleted data cache ids, so we can reuse them
core_deletedIds = [],
core_version = "1.10.2",
------
And now at the minify source:
(function(e,t){var n,r,i=typeof t,o=e.location,a=e.document,s=a.documentElement,
l=e.jQuery,u=e.$,c={},p=[],f="1.10.2", ....
I think now you see it =>
window => e
undefined => t
readyList => n
rootjQuery => r
core_strundefined => i
location => o
document => a
So its mapped somehow to make it more shorter look here to minify something
People normally use this so there is no way back
you can just format it look here

If the code has only been minified then the best you can do automatically is reformat to make it more readable. One way of doing this is using an online formatter/beautifier. E.g. Copy and paste the line of code you posted into http://jsbeautifier.org/ or http://www.jspretty.com/ and it'll produce something like this:
var flashVer = -1;
if (navigator.plugins != null && navigator.plugins.length > 0) {
if (navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash 2.0"]
|| navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash"]) {
var swVer2 = navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash 2.0"] ? ""
But of course what these don't do is put any comments that have been removed by the minifier back in. And if the code has also been obfuscated then it will be a lot less readable since the variable names will have changed (e.g. var a instead of var flashVer). See here for further details.

As you can see from the other answers, there is no way to reconstitute minified Javascript back into its original form, it is a lossy compression. The best you can do is make it readable by reformatting it.
If the code is open source, then it is likely that the code will exists in a raw state on some form of version control site or as a zip. Why not just download the raw version if available?

There is an online tool to unminify Javascripts
http://jsbeautifier.org/
And also for CSS
http://mrcoles.com/blog/css-unminify/

How would I solve a coding puzzle with Javascript?

There is a website called Gild.com that has different coding puzzles/challenges for users to do. They can be completed in wide array of languages including Javascript. I am interested in solving these puzzles in Javascript, but I am unsure of the following:
How am I supposed to access the input file which is supposed to be passed as an argument?
How am I supposed to output the result?
My understanding of Javascript is that it is run from within an HTML page and that output really is only in the form of placing values in the HTML, modifying the DOM, etc. For that reason it is not clear to me how Javascript can be used for solving these types of problems. Can someone who has used Gild before or has some insights into my question suggest how to proceed?
An example of a problem would be: the given input file contains a positive integer, find the sum of all prime numbers smaller than that integer and output it.
EDIT: Some of the solutions below involve using external resources, but on Gild, I am supposed to put my solution in their editor and then submit it that way, like the following picture shows:
In other words, I don't think my solution can have access to Node.js or other external resources.
Edit: Here are some interesting articles that I have found that I think are the answer to my question:
http://www.phpied.com/installing-rhino-on-mac/
http://www.phpied.com/javascript-shell-scripting/

I haven't spent much time on Gild, but I do a lot of similar types of problems on Project Euler. I think the best way to go is probably Node.js.
If you're not familiar, Node is basically server-side JavaScript that runs in Google's V8 engine. Installing it on your own Mac/Windows machine takes about 2 minutes. It's also really fast (considering it's JavaScript).
And you'd use it like this:
var fs = require('fs'); // the filesystem module
var contents = fs.readFileSync('theFile.txt', 'utf-8');
// Do stuff with the file contents...
Everything after those first two lines can be done with the same JS you'd write in the browser, right down to calling console.log() to spit out the answer.
So, if you wrote your script in a file on your desktop called getprimes.js, you'd open up your terminal and enter node ~/Desktop/getprimes.js (assuming you're on a Mac)

If you're:
on a Mac,
planning to do a lot of these puzzles, and
willing to pay $10, then
I highly recommend CodeRunner. It encapsulates runtimes for a variety of languages — from C to JavaScript — and lets you quickly build and run any sort of one-off code. Just hack together your code, ⌘R, and the results are printed right there in the same window.
I haven't used any file-based JavaScript in CodeRunner, but I imagine kennis's suggestions would apply. To output your results:
console.log(...)
Easy as pie!

Javascript Sandbox?

Would it be possible to sandbox user-submitted Javascript by overriding various functions such as alert, window.location, and eval?
I'm not looking for a perfect solution. I'm sure some people would still find a way to rearrange divs to spell out swear words or something malicious, but if I could disable page redirects 100% reliably I would be mostly happy.
I tried in Chrome, and doing something like
context={}; //use this to prevent `this` from being `window`
context.f=function(){
var window=null,location=null,eval=function(){};
console.log(window); //also the other two
};
context.f();
seems promising. If I replace the console line with user-submitted code (checking for paren balancing), would that be an absurdly bad idea or a mildly bad idea? On Chrome I can still break things by going through this to Function and redefining things, but that would be acceptable to me.

You can use Microsoft Web Sandbox or Google Caja.

Here are two more possible solutions (disclaimer: I just started looking for this myself, so I am not an expert).
This is very interesting, uses web workers to sandbox untrusted code:
https://github.com/eligrey/jsandbox
even though, I wonder if that is maintaned anymore, or if the following html5 "sandbox" iframe attribute supersedes it:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/att_iframe_sandbox.asp

vm.js is a javascript virtual machine implemented in pure coffeescript(should run in relatively old browsers) and can be used as a lightweight in-process sandbox. It can break infinite loops and shields global objects from modifications.

Depending on what this needs to do, you could always run the javascript in a document-context-free environment, like through Rhino, and then grab the results server-side and clean/insert those.

You could also try Douglas Crockford's AdSafe, though it does limit the possibilities of JavaScript.

Masking the globals with local variables is not secure actually. Preprocessing the untrusted code with tools like Google Caja may help, but it's not necessary:
For a web-browser simply running a code in a Worker is enough - it seems to be pretty restricted nowadays. See update below
For Node.js you may fork() in a sandboxed process and execute the code there (using the child_process module).
There are also some libraries for simplifying the sandboxing, one of those created by myself is Jailed (there's also a demo with JS-Console which executes user-submitted code in a sandbox).
Update: obviously I was wrong, the worker is not secure by itself, as it can access some of same-origin stuff, like IndexedDB for instance. I have submitted a related question. The solution is to additionally put the worker into a sasndboxed iframe, which is also implemented in my Jailed library.

Use HTML5 "sandbox" iframe attribute.

I made a javascript function for this.
function evalUnsafe(userCode) {
var vars = [];
var legal = {console: 'console', alert: 'alert'};
for(var b in this) {
if (!(b in legal)) {
vars.push(b);
}
}
var funcs = vars.join(",");
var code = "(function sandbox(" + funcs + ") {function runthis() {eval(" + JSON.stringify(userCode) + ");};var a = new runthis();})();";
eval(code);
}
And then you can do this
Example 1:
evalUnsafe("alert(window);");
Example 2 (from a php file):
evalUnsafe(<?php echo json_encode(file_get_contents("example.js"));?>);
You can download it from here:
https://github.com/oyvindrestad/javascriptsandbox

Set working directory in javascript

Does anyone know how to set the working directory in JavaScript before?
Code I use for launching an application is this:
// Create an object script
oL = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
oFile = '"C:/Application.exe"';
oL.run(oFile);

According to MSDN, you should be able to use:
var oL = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
oL.CurrentDirectory = "C:\\Foo\\Bar";
oFile = '"C:\\Application.exe"';
oL.run(oFile);
...assuming you're running this script in Windows Script Host, in which case you probably ought to make that clear in your question - about 99% of JavaScript programmers only ever use the language in a web browser, where this kind of stuff is only possible under extremely unusual circumstances.

Javascript typically runs in a sandbox that means it doesn't have access to the filesystem anyway, thus setting the cwd is meaningless.
What context are you trying to do this in (website javascript, local script running with Rhino etc.) and what are you trying to achieve?

Javascript dosent have access to your harddrive so why should you be able to set the working directory?