request

The request module lets you make simple yet powerful network requests.

API Reference

Classes

Request

The Request object is used to make GET, POST or PUT network requests. It is constructed with a URL to which the request is sent. Optionally the user may specify a collection of headers and content to send alongside the request and a callback which will be executed once the request completes.

Once a Request object has been created a GET request can be executed by calling its get() method, a POST request by calling its post() method, or a PUT request by calling its put() method.

When the server completes the request, the Request object emits a "complete" event. Registered event listeners are passed a Response object.

Each Request object is designed to be used once. Once GET, POST or PUT are called, attempting to call either will throw an error.

Since the request is not being made by any particular website, requests made here are not subject to the same-domain restriction that requests made in web pages are subject to.

With the exception of response, all of a Request object's properties correspond with the options in the constructor. Each can be set by simply performing an assignment. However, keep in mind that the same validation rules that apply to options in the constructor will apply during assignment. Thus, each can throw if given an invalid value.

The example below shows how to use Request to get the most recent public tweet.

var Request = require("request").Request;
var latestTweetRequest = Request({
  url: "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/public_timeline.json",
  onComplete: function (response) {
    var tweet = response.json[0];
    console.log("User: " + tweet.user.screen_name);
    console.log("Tweet: " + tweet.text);
  }
});

// Be a good consumer and check for rate limiting before doing more.
Request({
  url: "http://api.twitter.com/1/account/rate_limit_status.json",
  onComplete: function (response) {
    if (response.json.remaining_hits) {
      latestTweetRequest.get();
    } else {
      console.log("You have been rate limited!");
    }
  }
}).get();
Constructors
Request(options)

This constructor creates a request object that can be used to make network requests. The constructor takes a single parameter options which is used to set several properties on the resulting Request.

options : object
url : string

This is the url to which the request will be made.

[ onComplete : function ]

This function will be called when the request has received a response (or in terms of XHR, when readyState == 4). The function is passed a Response object.

[ headers : object ]

An unordered collection of name/value pairs representing headers to send with the request.

[ content : string,object ]

The content to send to the server. If content is a string, it should be URL-encoded (use encodeURIComponent). If content is an object, it should be a collection of name/value pairs. Nested objects & arrays should encode safely.

For GET requests, the query string (content) will be appended to the URL. For POST and PUT requests, the query string will be sent as the body of the request.

[ contentType : string ]

The type of content to send to the server. This explicitly sets the Content-Type header. The default value is application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

[ overrideMimeType : string ]

Use this string to override the MIME type returned by the server in the response's Content-Type header. You can use this to treat the content as a different MIME type, or to force text to be interpreted using a specific character.

For example, if you're retrieving text content which was encoded as ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1), it will be given a content type of "utf-8" and certain characters will not display correctly. To force the response to be interpreted as Latin-1, use overrideMimeType:

var Request = require("request").Request;
var quijote = Request({
  url: "http://www.latin1files.org/quijote.txt",
  overrideMimeType: "text/plain; charset=latin1",
  onComplete: function (response) {
    console.log(response.text);
  }
});

quijote.get();
Methods
get()

Make a GET request.

Returns: Request
post()

Make a POST request.

Returns: Request
put()

Make a PUT request.

Returns: Request
Properties
url : string
headers : object
content : string,object
contentType : string
response : Response
Events
complete

The Request object emits this event when the request has completed and a response has been received.

Response

Listener functions are passed the response to the request as a Response object.

Response

The Response object contains the response to a network request issued using a Request object. It is returned by the get(), post() or put() method of a Request object.

All members of a Response object are read-only.

Properties
text : string

The content of the response as plain text.

json : object

The content of the response as a JavaScript object. The value will be null if the document cannot be processed by JSON.parse.

status : string

The HTTP response status code (e.g. 200).

statusText : string

The HTTP response status line (e.g. OK).

headers : object

The HTTP response headers represented as key/value pairs.

To print all the headers you can do something like this:

for (var headerName in response.headers) {
  console.log(headerName + " : " + response.headers[headerName]);
}