How can I get Alexa to read the contents of a single line web page

Question

I have an external webpage that contains only the following:-

{"date":"25 December 2017"}

Using node.js, how can I get Alexa to read (and say) the date from the webpage.

Answer 1

You can use "http" or "https" package in Node to do this. JSON.parse(responsestring) could easily parse the content you have shown above. Your external webpage link would replace "yourendpoint" in below code.

var http = require("http");

http.get(yourendpoint, function (response) {
    // console.log("response:" + response);
    // data is streamed in chunks from the server
    // so we have to handle the "data" event    
    var buffer = "", data;

    response.on("data", function (chunk) {
        buffer += chunk;
    }); 

    response.on("end", function (err) {
        if(err) {
            speechOutput = "I am sorry, I could not get the data from webpage ."
        } else {
            console.log("response:" + buffer);
            // Parse your response the way you want
            speechOutput = "<<Your desired output>>"
            }               
        }
        this.emit(':tell', speechOutput);
    }); 
});