How can I replicate the functionality of a wget with node.js?

Question

Is it possible to essentially run a wget from within a node.js app? I'd like to have a script that crawls a site, and downloads a specific file, but the href of the link that goes the file changes fairly often. So, I figured the easiest way to go about doing it would be to find the href of the link, then just perform a wget on it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

For future reference though, I would recommend request, which makes it this easy to fetch that file:

var request = require("request");

request(url, function(err, res, body) {
  // Do funky stuff with body
});

Answer 2

While it might be a little more verbose than some third-party stuff, Node's core HTTP module provides for an HTTP client you could use for this:

var http = require('http');
var options = {
    host: 'www.site2scrape.com',
    port: 80,
    path: '/page/scrape_me.html'
  };
var req = http.get(options, function(response) {
  // handle the response
  var res_data = '';
  response.on('data', function(chunk) {
    res_data += chunk;
  });
  response.on('end', function() {
    console.log(res_data);
  });
});
req.on('error', function(err) {
  console.log("Request error: " + err.message);
});