HTML Pages

Part of the Express Basics section of Coddy's Node.js journey. Lesson 8 of 20.

Your recipes belong on a real page, and a browser only draws HTML. A page is a string of HTML: res.send sends it as text/html, and a template string fills it with data.

app.get('/weather/:city', (req, res) => {
    const city = escapeHtml(req.params.city);
    res.send(`<h1>Weather in ${city}</h1><p>Sunny</p>`);
});

Text from outside, like a URL part or a title someone typed, may hold < or &. Put into HTML as it is, <script> becomes code that runs in your visitor's browser. escapeHtml turns those characters into entities the browser shows as text. It replaces & first, so the & of < is not replaced again.

const escapeHtml = (text) =>
    text
        .replaceAll('&', '&amp;')
        .replaceAll('<', '&lt;')
        .replaceAll('>', '&gt;')
        .replaceAll('"', '&quot;');

Challenge

Easy

GET / answers an HTML page listing every recipe title.
Each title links to its page, like <a href="/recipes/2">.
Every title goes through escapeHtml.

Open / in the page view and click Fish & Chips.

Try it yourself

import express from 'express';
import { recipes } from './data.js';

const app = express();

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
    res.send('Welcome to Recipe Box');
});

// type('text') sends plain text, so each title shows on its own line.
app.get('/recipes', (req, res) => {
    const { tag } = req.query;
    const list = tag ? recipes.filter((recipe) => recipe.tags.includes(tag)) : recipes;
    res.type('text').send(list.map((recipe) => recipe.title).join('\n'));
});

app.get('/recipes/:id', (req, res) => {
    const recipe = recipes.find((r) => r.id === Number(req.params.id));
    if (!recipe) {
        res.status(404).send('No such recipe');
        return;
    }
    res.send(recipe.title);
});

app.get('/api/recipes', (req, res) => {
    res.json(recipes);
});

app.get('/api/recipes/:id', (req, res) => {
    const recipe = recipes.find((r) => r.id === Number(req.params.id));
    if (!recipe) {
        res.status(404).json({ error: 'No such recipe' });
        return;
    }
    res.json(recipe);
});

app.get('/about', (req, res) => {
    res.send('Recipe Box collects family recipes.');
});

app.listen(3000, () => {
    console.log('Recipe Box is running on port 3000');
});