Set response encoding

[nickdima]

I wanted to get a buffer out of some binary data from a GET request but I couldn't get it to work unless I put res.setEncoding('binary') inside http.js
Any suggestions?

[mzabriskie]

Would you mind sharing a Plunker with an example of your code?

[nickdima]

This is a stripped down version of my code, in coffeescript

axios = require 'axios'
Zip = require 'adm-zip'

downloadSubitles = () ->
  axios
    url: 'http://subscene.com/subtitle/download?mac=PEuUfx42AOa6Sju0WvWBFlbLF_YeiqKwsB62_ws6DQH1khKyJy1_sj0-df29vIFw0'
  .then (response) ->
    buffer = new Buffer(response.data, 'binary')
    zip = new Zip(buffer)
    srt = zip.readAsText zip.getEntries()[0]

[mzabriskie]

There is a responseType property in the config, but it only works in the browser at the moment. I think we could just leverage the same property and implement it for node.js.

[nickdima]

That would be good!

[nickdima]

I've been looking a bit into this, so I think maybe we could support buffer and string for the responseType in Node.js. When it's set to buffer we would read the response stream into a buffer and when set to string just set the encoding to utf-8 and concatenate the chunks.
I could prepare a PR if you like the idea.

[mzabriskie]

@nickdima sorry I've totally neglected your issue. Yes, please submit a PR.

[nnarhinen]

Also loosely related, responseType: 'arraybuffer' does not work in the browser because responseText property is not readable in such responses. Has to be read from response instead.

[sorenbs]

Looking forward to this. My use case is websites that don't properly specify encoding in headers, but do specify it in a meta tag. So I need to parse as utf-8 first, and then possibly re-parse as different content type.

[nickdima]

Sorry guys, I haven't use axios lately so I wont be able to work on that PR at this point. Maybe someone else could give it a try.

[mzabriskie]

I believe that this has been solved. See current http implementation https://github.com/mzabriskie/axios/blob/master/lib/adapters/http.js#L93-L96