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JavaScript Node.js Basics 2017 Building a Command Line Application Capturing Command Line Arguments

Akshay Bhamare
Akshay Bhamare
15,616 Points
Posted by Akshay Bhamare
Akshay Bhamare
15,616 Points

Accessing the response argument as an object

Hi, I don't understand that after getting a response in the get method as an object why are we still again creating a new object by parsing data in JSON?? How the argument(response) is different than the profile object ??

2 Answers

Miguel Barra
Miguel Barra
6,855 Points
Miguel Barra
Miguel Barra
6,855 Points

When you perform

response.on('data', data => {
 // here we get the data as a buffer object
}

what you get is the data (the response) as a buffer. A buffer is not legible to human eyes so you need to parse it to a string object. Then, in the end callback method you parse the string response into a JSON object

response.on('end', () => {
  // Parse the data
  const profile = JSON.parse(body);
  // Print the data
  printMessage(username, profile.badges.length, profile.points.JavaScript);
});

And to claritfy, to access the body of the response you need to use response.on('nameofthecalback'...

Pepe Toño
Pepe Toño
13,815 Points
Pepe Toño
Pepe Toño
13,815 Points

In practice, get method just returns a response in JSON format by default; However, I think the TreeHouse API endpoint (https://teamtreehouse.com/username.json) returns a kind of custom JSON object where is needed to format de chunk of data