danmactough
commented
4 years ago If they can do it in the fs routines, it must be possible for me to do it in my own code, right??
Well, you can but Node core does not enable it as easily for HTTP calls as it does for fs calls. HTTP calls are not implemented synchronously at all in the Node internals; fs calls are. I imagine (don't know) that it was a deliberate choice to avoid giving people an easy way to build slow web applications.
There are only 2 ways to get synchronous HTTP requests:
- use a child process (for which there are synchronous methods); or
- build an http client that does not use node internals at all (for example, binding to a different C++ library)
For the child process approach, check out this library https://github.com/ForbesLindesay/sync-request
var request = require('sync-request');
var res = request('GET', 'http://example.com');
console.log(res.getBody());For the "build an http client" approach, there's https://github.com/dhruvbird/http-sync which is built using libcurl. This one looks pretty solid, but the interface looks pretty awful, although you could write a wrapper around it, I guess:
// example with default options
httpSync = require('http-sync');
var request = httpSync.request({
method: 'GET',
headers: {},
body: '',
protocol: 'http',
host: '127.0.0.1',
port: 80, //443 if protocol = https
path: '/'
});
var timedout = false;
req.setTimeout(10, function() {
console.log("Request Timedout!");
timedout = true;
});
var response = request.end();
if (!timedout) {
console.log(response);
console.log(response.body.toString());
}
scripting
TL;DR: If they can do it in the fs routines, it must be possible for me to do it in my own code, right??
In Frontier, you make a simple HTTP request this way:
htmltext = tcp.httpReadUrl ("http://scripting.com"/)I want to do the same thing in Node.
No callback. Just return the contents of the page. If I want to catch the error I can put it inside try/catch.
I have tried reading the source for the fs sync routines. Eventually it will click and I'll see how to do this. If they can do it, presumably so can I. But I thought I'd ask if people can show me how to do this sooner.
The answer should be in pseudocode. No need to go into the details of making an actual HTTP request. And just use basic JavaScript, I don't want promises or async/await. I want it to be as simple as shown above. Thanks!
PS: The reason is I want to have Frontier-like scripting for Node-implemented websites. I want to use JavaScript syntax, not bash or Python. I like JS. ;-)