Nodejs / Cheerio cannot get rid of whitespaces - node.js

Question

i am trying to scrape today's matches on betfair and wanna get:
home team
away team
x odd
draw odd
y odd
problem is i keep getting multiple spaces, i have tried alot and cannot fix it, the problem is not with trim but with the execution flow that causes empty lines
Can somebody tell me what im doing wrong?
My code:
const request = require('request');
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const fs = require('fs');
var url = 'https://www.betfair.com/sport/football';
var customHeaderRequest = request.defaults({
headers: {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36'}
})
customHeaderRequest.get(url, function(err, resp, body){
$ = cheerio.load(body);
links = $('.section-list .section:nth-child(2) .event-list li');
$(links).each(function(i, link){
var home = $(link).find('.event-information div:nth-child(3) div a div span.team-name:nth-child(1)');
var h = home.text();
if(h != null || h!=''){
fs.appendFile('message.txt', h+'\n', function (err) {});
}
});
});

Answer 1

You shouldn't be calling fs.appendFile() in a loop like this and you may need a better test for an empty line than just what you were using. fs.appendFile() is an asynchronous operation and you're essentially calling a whole bunch of fs.appendFile() operations one after another without waiting for the prior ones to finish.
You can either use a stream or you have to wait until the previous fs.appendFile() is done before calling the next one.
And, if you want to make sure you have no blank-looking results, you need a better filter for results that have only whitespace in them (I added .trim() to my code below).
Here's one way to do that:
const request = require('request');
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const fs = require('fs');
const util = require('util');
const appendFile = util.promisify(fs.appendFile);
var url = 'https://www.betfair.com/sport/football';
var customHeaderRequest = request.defaults({
headers: {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36'}
})
customHeaderRequest.get(url, async function(err, resp, body){
try {
let $ = cheerio.load(body);
let links = $('.section-list .section:nth-child(2) .event-list li').toArray();
for (let link of links) {
const home = $(link).find('.event-information div:nth-child(3) div a div span.team-name:nth-child(1)').text().trim();
if (home) {
await appendFile('message.txt', home +'\n');
}
}
} catch(e) {
// error writing to the file, handle that error here
}
});
Other notes: You should also always declare all local variables you are using so they are never allowed to be implicit globals.