Consuming streams

As of Node v0.10.x, every readable stream has a read method that can be used to access data that's loaded into our read stream. Prior to Node v0.10.x, chunks of data were captured by listening to a data event; we can still do this when it is suitable (see the There's More… section) but this depends on the use case; therefore using the read method instead can be cleaner.

In this recipe, we're going to receive a stream from the Couch database that backs the npm registry and simply log out everything we get.

Getting ready

All we need to do is create a file named npm_stream_receiver.js.

How to do it…

We're going use the response object returned from an http.get call as our readable stream and set up some initial variables, so we'll require the http module as shown in the following code:

var http = require('http'), feed = 'http://isaacs.iriscouch.com/registry/_changes?feed=continuous', ready = false; 

We'll pass the feed variable to http.get.

The ready variable is being used to introduce...