Need better Node.js http.get request error handling

Question

Need better Node.js http.get request error handling

I use following http.get() call to call a local endpoint:

http.get({
    host: 'localhost',
    port: 80,
    path: '/service/info?id=' + id
}, function(response) {
            console.log(response);
    response.setEncoding('utf8');
    var data = "";

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

    response.on('end', function() {
        if(data.length > 0) {
            try {
                var data_object = JSON.parse(data);
            } catch(e) {
                return;
            }
        }
    });
}).on("error", function (){console.log("GET request error")});

However, if I send a malformed request, which would trigger a HTTP 400, the request is synthetically incorrect etc, even though the response.statusCode in function(response) is 400, it would end up to the catch() response.on('end', function() {} instead of emitting the error event on http.get(), I wonder why that's the case and how i can handle HTTP 400 response as an error on node.js.

If it gets to catch(e), it waits a long time till it responses anything to the client, which is also weird. I want the server to respond to the client that it hits a 400 as soon as possible.

javascript
node.js

Answer 1

response.statusCode contains the status code, you can get that in the http.get(...,cb()) or you can set up a listener

    request.on('response', function (response) {});

that can get the status code. You can then destroy the request if you want to cancel the GET, or handle it however you want.

Answer 2

Elaborating on jeremy's answer, here is an example of checking the status code that works for me:

  http.get(url, function (res) {
    var statusCode = res.statusCode;
    if (statusCode != 200) {
      console.log("non-200 response status code:");
      console.log(res.statusCode);
      console.log("for url:");
      console.log(url);
      return;
    }
    // do some stuff :-)

  });