I'm trying to get some data from a third party service using the node request module and return this data as string from a function. My perception was that request()
returns a readable stream since you can do request(...).pipe(writeableStream)
which - I thought - implies that I can do
function getData(){
var string;
request('someurl')
.on('data', function(data){
string += data;
})
.on('end', function(){
return string;
});
}
but this does not really work. I think I have some wrong perception of how request() or node streams really work. Can somebody clear up my confusion here?
It does work exactly the way you explained. Maybe the problem that you're facing is due to the asynchronous nature of node.js. I'm quite sure you're calling your getData()
in a synchronous way. Try this and see if you're request
call is not returning something:
request('someurl')
.on('data', function(data){
console.log(data.toString());
.on('end', function(){
console.log("This is the end...");
});
Take a look at this piece of article here. It's not short, but it explains how to write your code in order to deal with this kind of situation.