special characters are encoded in nodejs Express. how to decode it? - node.js

Question

I tried following these instruction but couldn't get the URI decoded. how can I go about this?
When I enter a city like http://localhost:5000/weather?weatherCity=Malmö the URL changes to this http://localhost:5000/weather?weatherCity=Malm%C3%B6,
How can I decode the last part and what am I doing wrong?
app.get('/weather', (req, res) => {
const weatherCity = (req.query.weatherCity)
let decodeURI = decodeURIComponent(weatherCity) //<------- trying to decode the query
request(weatherURL(decodeURI), function (error, response, body) {
if (error) {
throw error
}
const data = JSON.parse(body)
return res.send(data)
});
})
function weatherURL(weatherCity){
return `https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=${weatherCity}&units=metric&appid=${process.env.APIKEY}&lang=en`
}

Answer 1

This is probably what you need:
app.get('/weather', (req, res) => {
const weatherCity = req.query.weatherCity;
request(weatherURL(weatherCity), function (error, response, body) {
if (error) {
throw error
}
const data = JSON.parse(body)
return res.send(data)
});
})
function weatherURL(weatherCity){
return `https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=${encodeURIComponent(weatherCity)}&units=metric&appid=${process.env.APIKEY}&lang=en`
}
There should be no need to decode req.query.weatherCity because express does this automatically.
You do need to encode weatherCity before building a URL with it. URL query parameters should be URL encoded.
Consider using something other than request because it is deprecated and doesn't support promises. node-fetch and axios, among others, are good choices.