Question

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

Answer 1

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.