Consuming chunked data asyncrhonously in javascrip

Question

I have a (GET) endpoint that sends data in chunks (Transfer-Encoding: chunked). The data is JSON encoded and sent line by line.

Is there a way to consume the data sent by this endpoint in an asynchronous manner in JavaScript (or using some JavaScript library)?

To be clear, I know how to perform an asynchronous GET, but I would like to have the GET request not waiting for the whole data to be transfered, but instead read the data line by line as it arrives. For instance, when doing:

curl  http://localhost:8081/numbers

The lines below are shown one by one as they become available (the example server I made is waiting a second between sending a line and the second).

{"age":1,"name":"John"}
{"age":2,"name":"John"}
{"age":3,"name":"John"}
{"age":4,"name":"John"}

I would like to reproduce the same behavior curl exhibits, but in the browser. I don't want is leave the user wait till all the data becomes available in order to show anything.

Answer 1

Thanks to Dan and Redu I was able to put together an example that consumes data incrementally, using the Fetch API . The caveat is that this will not work on Internet Explorer, and it has to be enabled by the user in Firefox:

   /** This works on Edge, Chrome, and Firefox (from version 57). To use this example
    navigate to about:config and change

    - dom.streams.enabled preference to true
    - javascript.options.streams to true


    See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/ReadableStream
*/

fetch('http://localhost:8081/numbers').then(function(response) {

  console.log(response);

  const reader = response.body.getReader();

  function go() {
    reader.read().then(function(result) {
      if (!result.done) {
        var num = JSON.parse(
          new TextDecoder("utf-8").decode(result.value)
        );
        console.log(
          "Got number " + num.intVal
        );        
        go ();
      }
    })
  }

  go ();
})

The full example (with the server) is available at my sandbox. I find it illustrative of the limitations of XMLHttpRequest to compare this version with the this one, which does not use the fetch API.