How to buffer an HTTP response using the request module?

Question

I would like to stream the contents of an HTTP response to a variable. My goal is to get an image via request(), and store it in in MongoDB - but the image is alway

Answer 1

The request module buffers the response for you. In the callback, body is a string (or Buffer).

You only get a stream back from request if you don't provide a callback; request() returns a Stream.

See the docs for more detail and examples.

---

request assumes that the response is text, so it tries to convert the response body into a sring (regardless of the MIME type). This will corrupt binary data. If you want to get the raw bytes, specify a null encoding.

request({url:'http://google.com/doodle.png', encoding:null}, function (error, response, body) {
    db.images.insert({ filename: 'google.png', imgData: body}, function (err) {

        // handle errors etc.

    }); 
});