Nodejs, express http request - response not unzipping - node.js

Question

I am trying to write a function that creates an HTTPS request.
This is all part of an expressjs project with Typescript.
I can get the HTTPS request working and getting a response - but the response is encoded with GZIP. I am trying my best to follow the documentation. But no luck, the response stays zipped.
This is my code
private getData = (host, pathname): Promise<string> => {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
const options = {
hostname: host,
path: pathname,
gzip: true,
method: 'GET',
headers: {'x-apikey': 'XXXX'}
}
const req = https.request(options, (res) => {
if (res.statusCode < 200 || res.statusCode >= 300) {
console.log('error!')
return reject(new Error('statusCode=' + res.statusCode));
}
let body = '';
res.on('data', function (chunk) {
body += chunk;
});
res.on('end', function () {
try {
console.log('res.headers', res.headers)
console.log('res.headers', body)
body = JSON.parse.toString();
resolve(body);
} catch (e) {
reject(e);
}
resolve(body);
});
req.on('error', (e) => {
reject(e.message);
});
// send the request
});
req.end();
});
}
The console log statement shows this
So obviously the JSONparsing is failing. What am I missing?
Thanks heaps for the help

Answer 1

https.request() does not natively support gzip compression. So, you will have to either add support for it yourself as shown here or use an https request library such as got() that already supports gzip (and also already supports promises too).
import got from 'got';
private getData = (host, pathname): Promise<string> => {
const options = {
method: 'GET',
headers: {'x-apikey': 'XXXX'}
}
return got(`https://${host}${pathname}`, options).json();
}
FYI, it's not clear in your question what type of response you are expecting. You attempt to use:
body = JSON.parse.toString();
which doesn't make any sense because JSON.parse.toString() is trying to get string version of the JSON.parse function without actually even calling that function - very odd. Perhaps you meant JSON.parse(body)? But, your typescript makes it look like you're expecting a promise that resolves to a string so that wouldn't usually be the result of JSON parsing.
If you are expecting a gzipped JSON response, then you would use the:
return got(`https://${host}${pathname}`, options).json();
I show above. If you are expecting just a string, not JSON, then you would change that line to:
return got(`https://${host}${pathname}`, options).text();