Get the URL path from a link bookmark .url file

[astanley86]

Hello,

In my dropbox folder I have a bookmark to a website URL.  For example: http://www.google.com - this will be saved as 'Google.url' in my dropbox folder.

Which API will return 'http://www.google.com' so that in my app I can make this a clickable link?  

Thank you,

Andrew

[Greg-DB · Accepted solution]

For .url files, the URL information is saved in the file content. You can use /2/files/download to download the file content, and then parse and use it as desired. 

Using your example, if the file is saved as "Google.url" in your Dropbox root folder, you would supply the path "/Google.url" to download the file using the endpoint linked above (or the corresponding method if you're using an SDK or library) and then parse the URL from the returned file content in the response body.

[astanley86]

Thank you, Greg.  This gave me what I needed!  

I was not familiar with what to with the raw binary data returned from Dropbox.  After combining some answers from StackOverflow this is what I came up with which is working for me in my Angular 1 application.  I hope this code will help someone else who might be looking for this!

            function downloadFile(filePath) {
                if (!filePath) {
                    console.error('Cannot download file because no file was specified.');
                    return;
                }
                return $q(function(fulfill, reject) {
                    $http({
                        url: `${dropboxContent}/2/files/download`,
                        method: 'POST',
                        headers: {
                            'Authorization': 'Bearer {{access-token-goes-here}}',
                            'Dropbox-API-Arg': `{"path": "${filePath}"}`
                        },
                        responseType: 'blob'
                    }).then(
                        results => {
                            // data received from dropbox is binary data saved as a blob
                            // The FileReader object lets web applications asynchronously read the contents of files
                            // https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileReader
                            var fileReader = new FileReader();
                             // function will run after successfully reading the file
                            fileReader.onload = function() {
                                var string = this.result; // store the file contents
                                string = encodeURI(string); // get rid of the paragraph return characters
                                var endPosition = string.indexOf('%0D%0A', 32); // find the end of the URL, startPosition is 32
                                var actualURL = string.substring(32, endPosition); // grab only the characters between start and end positions
                                fulfill(actualURL);
                            };
                            fileReader.readAsText(results.data);                           
                        },
                        error => reject(error));
                });
            }

The tricky part is that you have to be able to 'read' the blob that is returned, and then extract out just the 'URL'. 

[Greg-DB]

[Cross-linking for reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41273258/read-downloaded-blob-from-dropbox-api-using-http ]

Thanks for sharing your solution!