I am a beginner to express.js
and I am trying to understand the difference between res.send
and res.write
?
Suppose you have two line that needs to be shown up and you use res.send as
res.send("shows only First Line")
res.send("won't show second Line")
Then only first line will show up, whereas using res.write
you have flexibility to write multiple line such as
res.write("Shows first line")
res.write("Shows second line")
res.send()
res.send
res.send
is only in Express.js.Content-Length
HTTP response header field.res.send
can only be called once, since it is equivalent to res.write
+ res.end()
app.get('/user/:id', function (req, res) {
res.send('OK');
});
For more details:
res.write
response.write('<html>');
response.write('<body>');
response.write('<h1>Hello, World!</h1>');
response.write('</body>');
response.write('</html>');
response.end();
For more details:
One of the most important differences not indicated in any of the answers are "draining".
The res.write
may return true or false. As of the documentation:
Returns true if the entire data was flushed successfully to the kernel buffer. Returns false if all or part of the data was queued in user memory. 'drain' will be emitted when the buffer is free again.
So, when doing res.write
, the caller should hold off writing until the drain event emits if the res.write
returned false.
All these are handled automatically in res.send
. The trade off is the buffering you will have to do when using the latter.
res.send
is equivalent to res.write + res.end
So the key difference is res.send
can be called only once where as res.write
can be called multiple times followed by a res.end
.
But apart from that res.send
is part of Express. It can automatically detect the length of response header.
But there may be be a chance of memory spike with res.send(), in case of large files, our application hangs in between .