I have a PhantomJS/CasperJS script which I'm running from within a node.js script using process.spawn()
. Since CasperJS doesn't support require()
ing modules, I'm trying to print commands from CasperJS to stdout
and then read them in from my node.js script using spawn.stdout.on('data', function(data) {});
in order to do things like add objects to redis/mongoose (convoluted, yes, but seems more straightforward than setting up a web service for this...) The CasperJS script executes a series of commands and creates, say, 20 screenshots which need to be added to my database.
However, I can't figure out how to break the data
variable (a Buffer
?) into lines... I've tried converting it to a string and then doing a replace, I've tried doing spawn.stdout.setEncoding('utf8');
but nothing seems to work...
Here is what I have right now
var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
var bin = "casperjs"
//googlelinks.js is the example given at http://casperjs.org/#quickstart
var args = ['scripts/googlelinks.js'];
var cspr = spawn(bin, args);
//cspr.stdout.setEncoding('utf8');
cspr.stdout.on('data', function (data) {
var buff = new Buffer(data);
console.log("foo: " + buff.toString('utf8'));
});
cspr.stderr.on('data', function (data) {
data += '';
console.log(data.replace("\n", "\nstderr: "));
});
cspr.on('exit', function (code) {
console.log('child process exited with code ' + code);
process.exit(code);
});
https://gist.github.com/2131204
Try this:
cspr.stdout.setEncoding('utf8');
cspr.stdout.on('data', function(data) {
var str = data.toString(), lines = str.split(/(\r?\n)/g);
for (var i=0; i<lines.length; i++) {
// Process the line, noting it might be incomplete.
}
});
Note that the "data" event might not necessarily break evenly between lines of output, so a single line might span multiple data events.
I've actually written a Node library for exactly this purpose, it's called stream-splitter and you can find it on Github: samcday/stream-splitter.
The library provides a special Stream
you can pipe your casper stdout into, along with a delimiter (in your case, \n), and it will emit neat token
events, one for each line it has split out from the input Stream
. The internal implementation for this is very simple, and delegates most of the magic to substack/node-buffers which means there's no unnecessary Buffer
allocations/copies.
Adding to maerics' answer, which does not deal properly with cases where only part of a line is fed in a data dump (theirs will give you the first part and the second part of the line individually, as two separate lines.)
var _breakOffFirstLine = /\r?\n/
function filterStdoutDataDumpsToTextLines(callback){ //returns a function that takes chunks of stdin data, aggregates it, and passes lines one by one through to callback, all as soon as it gets them.
var acc = ''
return function(data){
var splitted = data.toString().split(_breakOffFirstLine)
var inTactLines = splitted.slice(0, splitted.length-1)
var inTactLines[0] = acc+inTactLines[0] //if there was a partial, unended line in the previous dump, it is completed by the first section.
acc = splitted[splitted.length-1] //if there is a partial, unended line in this dump, store it to be completed by the next (we assume there will be a terminating newline at some point. This is, generally, a safe assumption.)
for(var i=0; i<inTactLines.length; ++i){
callback(inTactLines[i])
}
}
}
usage:
process.stdout.on('data', filterStdoutDataDumpsToTextLines(function(line){
//each time this inner function is called, you will be getting a single, complete line of the stdout ^^
}) )
You can give this a try. It will ignore any empty lines or empty new line breaks.
cspr.stdout.on('data', (data) => {
data = data.toString().split(/(\r?\n)/g);
data.forEach((item, index) => {
if (data[index] !== '\n' && data[index] !== '') {
console.log(data[index]);
}
});
});