Using zig http client

[ebon fjord]

Hi all, i am sending a request to the
https://uselessfacts.jsph.pl/api/v2/facts/random
using the zig http client, and following somewhat of this https://zig.news/nameless/coming-soon-to-a-zig-near-you-http-client-5b81 example.
I am just not sure how can i extract the text field, and how could i for example print it out to console.

I would say i need to use req.response.parser . but i am not sure how to exactly to "reach" the underlying value.

Thanks!

[lusty prawn]

req.reader().readAllAlloc(allocator, std.math.maxInt(usize))

reader gives you a reader from which you can read your data as required

here it would read as much data as the server is willing to give

[ebon fjord]

Okay, but what then ?
Isnt there a way to get underlying data ? Reader has not much info on it in documentation, and other helper methods read bytes, do i need somehow to convert this stream of bytes or ?
Also response from that link is json, do i need to use some serialize / deserialize library to get underlying data easier

[native tree]

From the json pattern on the website you can construct a struct to hold that data, parse the string you get with std.json, and then print the text:

const Data = struct {
    id: []const u8,
    text: []const u8,
    source: []const u8,
    source_url: []const u8,
    language: []const u8,
    permalink: []const u8,
};

pub fn main() !void {
  // ...
  const json_str = try req.reader().readAllAlloc(alloc, std.math.maxInt(usize));
  defer alloc.free(json_str);

  const data = try std.json.parseFromSlice(Data, alloc, json_str, .{});
  defer data.deinit();

  std.debug.print("fact! {s}\n", .{data.value.text});
}

[ebon fjord]

Okay, this does work, but i feel its quite confusing, why are all the fields of Data struct u8 ?, wouldnt it make sense for text to be a string ?
first you fetch and store to memory all the data from response, and then try to parse it to json struct representation and lastly we print out one of the struct fields to console

[native tree]

theres no "string" type in zig, []const u8 is how we represent a string of text

parsing it into a struct is just the easiest way to access the fields of a json string as far as i know

[lusty prawn]

* when I PR parseStreaming, Parser will be

[native tree]

ayyy looking forward to that, was thinking of implementing a less strict parser myself so i could only grab the info i wanted lol

[lusty prawn]

it's already solved itself :P

the new std.json does this

thanks whoever did that

std.json.parseFrom* with Value

[native tree]

oh sweet

[ebon fjord]

So in the example above i could extract only the field "text" for example? But the data json mapping woyld still be needed

[lusty prawn]

yep