Where is body in a nodejs http.get response?

http.request docs contains example how to receive body of the response through handling data event:

var options = {
  host: 'www.google.com',
  port: 80,
  path: '/upload',
  method: 'POST'
};

var req = http.request(options, function(res) {
  console.log('STATUS: ' + res.statusCode);
  console.log('HEADERS: ' + JSON.stringify(res.headers));
  res.setEncoding('utf8');
  res.on('data', function (chunk) {
    console.log('BODY: ' + chunk);
  });
});

req.on('error', function(e) {
  console.log('problem with request: ' + e.message);
});

// write data to request body
req.write('data\n');
req.write('data\n');
req.end();

http.get does the same thing as http.request except it calls req.end() automatically.

var options = {
  host: 'www.google.com',
  port: 80,
  path: '/index.html'
};

http.get(options, function(res) {
  console.log("Got response: " + res.statusCode);

  res.on("data", function(chunk) {
    console.log("BODY: " + chunk);
  });
}).on('error', function(e) {
  console.log("Got error: " + e.message);
});

I also want to add that the http.ClientResponse returned by http.get() has an end event, so here is another way that I receive the body response:

var options = {
  host: 'www.google.com',
  port: 80,
  path: '/index.html'
};

http.get(options, function(res) {
  var body = '';
  res.on('data', function(chunk) {
    body += chunk;
  });
  res.on('end', function() {
    console.log(body);
  });
}).on('error', function(e) {
  console.log("Got error: " + e.message);
}); 

Edit: replying to self 6 years later

The await keyword is the best way to get a response from an HTTP request, avoiding callbacks and .then()

You'll also need to use an HTTP client that returns Promises. http.get() still returns a Request object, so that won't work.

• fetch is a low level client, that is both available from npm and will be in future versions of node
• superagent is a mature HTTP clients that features more reasonable defaults including simpler query string encoding, properly using mime types, JSON by default, and other common HTTP client features.
• axios is also quite popular and has similar advantages to superagent

await will wait until the Promise has a value - in this case, an HTTP response!

const superagent = require('superagent');

(async function(){
  const response = await superagent.get('https://www.google.com')
  console.log(response.text)
})();

Using await, control simply passes onto the next line once the promise returned by superagent.get() has a value.

The data event is fired multiple times with 'chunks' of the body as they are downloaded and an end event when all chunks have been downloaded.

With Node supporting Promises now, I created a simple wrapper to return the concatenated chunks through a Promise:

const httpGet = url => {
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    http.get(url, res => {
      res.setEncoding('utf8');
      let body = ''; 
      res.on('data', chunk => body += chunk);
      res.on('end', () => resolve(body));
    }).on('error', reject);
  });
};

You can call it from an async function with:

const body = await httpGet('http://www.somesite.com');

If you want to use .get you can do it like this

http.get(url, function(res){
    res.setEncoding('utf8');
    res.on('data', function(chunk){
        console.log(chunk);
    });

});