Getting body from requests module, Nodejs

Question

I am fairly new to Javascript/Node. But I have some programming expierence around Python, Java and C++. However. I can't seem to figure out the scope of the variables. For instance, I've got a variable named x and a method, which gets via a get request a body of a sepecific website. Now I want to store it in another variable.

Dependency I use.

My script:

const request = require('request');

var x;

request('http://www.google.com', function(err, res, body) {
  return this.x = body;
});

console.log(x); // Should return the "body" from the request method.

returns:

undefined

See [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14220321/how-do-i-return-the-response-from-an-asynchronous-call?rq=1). The code is slightly different but the concept is the same. — Mika Sundland, Dec 03 '17 at 13:10

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 03 '17 at 13:25

You put just var x; at the top scope and assigne the content of x inside of the callback. So what actually happens is

Declare variable x
Start request to google
Console.log(x); which is still undefined / null
Response from request to Google should arrive, then it will assign the response body to x.

You need to understand that it is async.

Getting body from requests module, Nodejs

1 Answers1