Writing HTTP response to page appears as plaintext

Question

I am forwarding a request made from a proxy server and rendering the response in the browser. However, when i render the response with res.write(data), it comes up as plaintext instead of rendered html:

http.createServer(function targetServer(req, res) {
    res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
    var request = http.request('http://www.google.com', function(res) {
        var body = '';
        response.on('data', function(chunk) {
            body += chunk;
        });
        response.on('end', function() {
            fs.writeFile('res.txt', body, {encoding:'utf8'}, function() {
                util.puts('Success!');

            });
            res.write(body);
        });
    });
    request.end();  
});

the contents of res.txt are:

<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage" lang="en"><head><meta content="Search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for." name="description"><meta content="noodp" name="robots"><meta content="/images/google_favicon_128.png" itemprop="image"><title>Google</title>
<!-- other html -->
</html>

but instead of rendering like google.com, it looks like the res.txt file:

<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage" lang="en"><head><meta content="Search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for." name="description"><meta content="noodp" name="robots"><meta content="/images/google_favicon_128.png" itemprop="image"><title>Google</title>
<!-- other html -->
</html>

Can someone explain to me what I'm doing wrong?

UPDATE

After changing the content type to text/html, i now get an error in the browser:

The character encoding of the plain text document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the file needs to be declared in the transfer protocol or file needs to use a byte order mark as an encoding signature.

Whats this about?

Is your second res a typo? It seems you are using response instead ... — mscdex
– mscdex, Commented Oct 11, 2014 at 21:01

Sherman · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-11 21:13:42Z

1

Try:

res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/html' });

And then:

response.setEncoding('utf8');
response.on('data', function(chunk) {
    body += chunk;
});

edited Oct 11, 2014 at 21:13

answered Oct 11, 2014 at 20:54

Sherman

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5 Comments

dopatraman Over a year ago

thanks. Please see the update above, I'm getting an error related to the character encoding on the page.

dopatraman Over a year ago

Error: res has no method setEncoding

Sherman Over a year ago

Look at @mscdex's comment. You have a nested res that probably needs to be renamed to response.

dopatraman Over a year ago

No, the response object passed into http.request's callback does not have a write method. Only the http.createServer's callback does. It seems strange but apparently its how node works.

dopatraman Over a year ago

Great, that worked. I'm still having issues, but they are not related to this thread : stackoverflow.com/questions/26310708/…

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