Response encoding with node.js "request" module

Question

I am trying to get data from the Bing search API, and since the existing libraries seem to be based on old discontinued APIs I though I'd try myself using the `request` library, which appears to be the most common library for this. My code looks like ``` var SKEY = "myKey...." , ServiceRootURL = 'https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/Search/v1/Composite'; function getBingData(query, top, skip, cb) { var params = { Sources: "'web'", Query: "'"+query+"'", '$format': "JSON", '$top': top, '$skip': skip }, req = request.get(ServiceRootURL).auth(SKEY, SKEY, false).qs(params); request(req, cb) } getBingData("bookline.hu", 50, 0, someCallbackWhichParsesTheBody) ``` Bing returns some JSON and I can work with it sometimes but if the response body contains a large amount of non ASCII characters `JSON.parse` complains that the string is malformed. I tried switching to an ATOM content type, but there was no difference, the xml was invalid. Inspecting the response body as available in the `request(…

Accepted Answer

i'm not sure about the request library but the default nodejs one works well for me. It also seems a lot easier to read than your library and does indeed come back in chunks.

http://nodejs.org/api/http.html#http_http_request_options_callback or for https (like your req) http://nodejs.org/api/https.html#https_https_request_options_callback (the same really though)

For the options a little tip: use url parse

```
var url = require('url');

var params = '{}'

var dataURL = url.parse(ServiceRootURL);
var post_options = {  
    hostname: dataURL.hostname,
    port: dataURL.port || 80,
    path: dataURL.path,
    method: 'GET',  
    headers: {  
        'Content-Type': 'application/json; charset=utf-8',  
        'Content-Length': params.length  
    }  
};
```

obviously params needs to be the data you want to send

Response encoding with node.js "request" module

Solution

Problem