Optimize request usage

[samarpanda]

Optimized request usage!

Currently we are using request twice internally to get xkcd image url and title i.e

//Get num
request('http://xkcd.com/info.0.json',function (error, response, body) {
  //Get url and title
  request(xkcd_url, function (error, response, body) {});
});

I think we can do it in one request call, of course a little bit of scrapping though 😉
http://c.xkcd.com/random/comic/ => 302 redirection => to randomly show a comic.
As request module follows 302 redirection we can leverage this feature.

var request = require('request');
var cheerio = require('cheerio');
var targetUrl = "http://c.xkcd.com/random/comic/";

request(targetUrl, function(error, response, body){
    if(!error && response.statusCode == 200){
        $ = cheerio.load(body);
        var str = $("#middleContainer").text();
        var re = /http:\/\/xkcd\.com\/([0-9]+)\//;
        var pageUrl = str.match(re)[0];// xkcd page url
        var title = $("#comic img").attr("title");// xkcd image title
        var imgSrc = $("#comic img").attr("src");// xkcd image
    }
});

Let me know if it make sense to do this change 😕 ? Would love to raise a pull request if required.
Demo preview xkcd-json

[hemanth]

@samarpanda Instead of scraping the webpage, it's always better to stick with the JSON API.

The code is taking the current comic count from http://xkcd.com/info.0.json and then generating a random number within range and then fetching that comic again.

I can't think of avoiding two requests using this API, would be great if we you find one such API.

[samarpanda]

@hemanth 👍 make sense. Will check if i can. Another thought was to have some kind of caching for a day. So we do the comic count request once a day and not for every request of xkcd-imgs. Not sure how to implement a cache for a npm module or is it a good practise?

[hemanth]

@samarpanda node-cache is the first thing I can recall, it has a TTL as well.

[hemanth]

Caching wouldn't make it all that random, so abandoning the idea, feel free to reopen.