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doc: better example for http.get #9065

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doc: better example for http.get
marzelin Oct 12, 2016
dd28020
change generic example to json fetching example
marzelin Oct 13, 2016
1b4c0f8
fix style and add try catch around json.parse
marzelin Oct 13, 2016
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change url to nodejs.org host
marzelin Oct 14, 2016
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18 changes: 13 additions & 5 deletions doc/api/http.md
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Expand Up @@ -1354,16 +1354,24 @@ added: v0.3.6
-->

Since most requests are GET requests without bodies, Node.js provides this
convenience method. The only difference between this method and [`http.request()`][]
is that it sets the method to GET and calls `req.end()` automatically.
convenience method. The only difference between this method and
[`http.request()`][] is that it sets the method to GET and calls `req.end()`
automatically. Note that response data must be consumed in the callback
for reasons stated in [`http.ClientRequest`][] section.

`callback` takes one argument which is an instance of [`http.IncomingMessage`][]
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@jasnell jasnell Oct 13, 2016

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Please make this a proper sentence, e.g.:

The `callback` is invoked with a single argument that is an instance of
[`http.IncomingMessage`][]

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@marzelin marzelin Oct 13, 2016

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Great sentence. Thanks.


Example:

```js
http.get('http://www.google.com/index.html', (res) => {
console.log(`Got response: ${res.statusCode}`);
// consume response body
res.resume();
console.log(`STATUS: ${res.statusCode}`);
res.setEncoding('utf8');
let aggregatedData = '';
res.on('data', (chunk) => aggregatedData += chunk);
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@ChALkeR ChALkeR Oct 12, 2016

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Concatenating strings isn't a good method of getting the response body.

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@marzelin marzelin Oct 12, 2016

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@ChALkeR what's wrong with concatenating strings, and how it should be done then?

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@mscdex mscdex Oct 12, 2016 •
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Concatenating strings is fine if the response is text, but for binary it wouldn't work. Using binary from the get-go would work for both cases (e.g. pushing Buffers to an array, keeping a total byte count, and calling Buffer.concat() at the end) but still you'd have to know what to do with the end result (either converting to string or whatever), so it's kind of tricky for a generic example.

If we want to make it more concrete, we could turn it into a JSON fetching example. That way we could show checking the response code for 200, checking that the Content-Type starts with 'application/json', and then concatenating and parsing the response?

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@marzelin marzelin Oct 13, 2016

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JSON fetching example sound good.

res.on('end', () => {
console.log(`Message body: ${aggregatedData}`);
});
}).on('error', (e) => {
console.log(`Got error: ${e.message}`);
});
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