While loop in Javascript with a Callback

Question

I am trying to write the Pseudocode given here https://dev.twitter.com/docs/misc/cursoring with javascript using node-oauth https://github.com/ciaranj/node-oauth. However I am afraid because of the nature of the callback functions the cursor is never assigned to the next_cursor and the loop just runs forever. Can anyone think a workaround for this?

module.exports.getFriends = function (user ,oa ,cb){
  var friendsObject = {};
  var cursor = -1 ;
  while(cursor != 0){
    console.log(cursor);
      oa.get(
        'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/friends/list.json?cursor=' + cursor + '&skip_status=true&include_user_entities=false'
        ,user.token //test user token
        ,user.tokenSecret, //test user secret
        function (e, data, res){
          if (e) console.error(e);
          cursor = JSON.parse(data).next_cursor;
          JSON.parse(data).users.forEach(function(user){
            var name = user.name;
            friendsObject[name + ""] = {twitterHandle : "@" + user.name, profilePic: user.profile_image_url};
          });        
          console.log(friendsObject);   
        }
      );
    }  
  }

Answer 1

Suppose your code is wrapped in a function, I'll call it getFriends, basically it wraps everything inside the loop.

function getFriends(cursor, callback) {
  var url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/friends/list.json?cursor=' + cursor + '&skip_status=true&include_user_entities=false'
  oa.get(url, user.token, user.tokenSecret, function (e, data, res) {
    if (e) console.error(e);
    cursor = JSON.parse(data).next_cursor;
    JSON.parse(data).users.forEach(function(user){
      var name = user.name;
      friendsObject[name + ""] = {twitterHandle : "@" + user.name, profilePic: user.profile_image_url};
    });        
    console.log(friendsObject);
    callback(cursor); 
  });
}

In nodejs all io is done asynchronously, so you will loop a lot more than needed, before actually changing cursor, what you need is loop only when you receive a response from the Twitter API, you could do something like this:

function loop(cursor) {
  getFriends(cursor, function(cursor) {
    if (cursor != 0) loop(cursor);
    else return;
  });
}

You start it by calling loop(-1), of course this is just one way of doing it.

If you prefer you could use an external library, like async.