[Monkeyget]

I want to write a simple node application that fetches an http document and write it to the disk.

The only requirement is for the application to print out in plain English if there is one of the following error:

* the document doesn't exist

* there is a connection error during download

* the local file couldn't be opened

* an error occured during writing.

For any other error(out of memory,...) the program can crash.

How do I do that in node? I don't know.

The request package only tells me the callback's first parameter is "An error when applicable (usually from http.ClientRequest object)". The fs package only tells me "Event: 'error': Emitted if there was an error when writing or piping data."

I only picked error reporting as an example so I could showcase the problem of lack of documentation on the most basic APIs (http get and writing file). By the way the Error Handling article [0] on Joyent's website is absolutely wonderful.

Call me old fashioned but how can I use an API that doesn't tell me which function to call, what a function accepts as parameters, what it returns or how it signals error?

[0] https://www.joyent.com/developers/node/design/errors

[jhchen]

HTTP has standard error codes that tell you why a file didn't download (ex. 404 means it doesn't exist). File systems behave similarly (ex. ENOENT). None of this is language specific and therefore do not belong in Node.js documentation (except perhaps to say that these Node.js libraries also adhere to the same standards everyone else does but this is obvious the moment one of these error objects is printed or inspected).

[nawitus]

>but this is obvious the moment one of these error objects is printed or inspected

The point of documentation is that you don't have to run the code to see what the code does.