Trying to respond with text split into array of words from node.js http server

Question

Trying to respond with text split into array of words from node.js http server

New to node.js, appreciate all the help you can offer. Trying to response out the variable 'words' but when I start the server and go to localhost it crashes and says " TypeError: first argument must be a string or Buffer" but when I try to write the same variable to the console it works. Thanks for the help!

var http = require("http");
var fs = require('fs');
var text = fs.readFileSync("text.txt").toString();
var words = text.split(/\b/);
function start(){
function onRequest(request, response){
    response.writeHead(200, {"Content-type": "text/plain"});
    var wordCounts = '';

    for(var i = 0; i < words.length; i++)
    wordCounts["_" + words[i]] = (wordCounts["_" + words[i]] || 0) + 1;
        response.write(words);

    response.end();
}

http.createServer(onRequest).listen(8888);
console.log("server has started");
}

exports.start = start;

javascript
node.js

Answer 1

The console will have no problem with this, because it will automatically stringify most anything you put into console.log(). Try this: response.write(JSON.stringify(words))

Answer 2

I'd do it like this:

…
var words = text.split(/\s+/); // you hardly want to split on every word boundary
                               // but rather on the spaces in between
…
    var wordCounts = {}; // an object, not a string!
    for (var i = 0; i < words.length; i++)
        wordCounts["_" + words[i]] = (wordCounts["_" + words[i]] || 0) + 1;
    var result = Object.keys(wordCounts).sort(function(a, b) {
        return wordCounts[b]-wordCounts[a];
    }).map(function(w) {
        return w.slice(1)+": "+wordCounts[w];
    }).join("\n");
    response.write(result); // write a string!
…