My suggestion is to use an http library that supports both promises and gzip built in.  My current favorite is [`got()`][1].   `http.get()` is like the least featured http request library anywhere. You really don't have to write all this yourself.  Here's what your entire code would look like with the got() library:

    const got = require('got');
    
    function getRequest(url) {
        return got(url).json();
    }

This library handles all these things you need for you automatically:

1. Promises
2. JSON conversion
3. Gzip decoding
4. 2xx status detection (other status codes like 404 are turned into a promise rejection which your code does not do).

And, it has many, many other useful features for other general use.  The days of coding manually with `http.get()` should be long over.  No need to rewrite code that has already been written and well-tested for you.

FYI, there's a list of very capable http libraries here: https://github.com/request/request/issues/3143.  You can pick the one that has the API you like the best.

  [1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/got


### Problem

Related to [Get UTF-8 html content with Node's http.get][1] - but that answer isn't working for me.

I'm trying to call the [Stack Overflow API questions][2] endpoint:

```none
https://api.stackexchange.com/2.3/questions?site=stackoverflow&filter=total
```

Which should return the following JSON response:

```json
{"total":21951385}
```

### Example Code

I'm using the [`https`][3] node module to submit a [`get`][4] request like this:

```ts
const getRequest = (url: string) => new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    const options: RequestOptions = {
        headers: {
            'Accept': 'text/*',
            'Accept-Encoding':'identity',
            'Accept-Charset' : 'utf8',
        }
    }

    const req = get(url, options, (res) => {
        res.setEncoding('utf8');
        let responseBody = '';
        res.on('data', (chunk) => responseBody += chunk);
        res.on('end', () => resolve(responseBody));
    });

    req.on('error', (err) => reject(err));
    req.end();
})
```

And then invoking it like this:

```ts
const questionsUrl = 'https://api.stackexchange.com/2.3/questions?&site=stackoverflow&filter=total'
const resp = await getRequest(questionsUrl)
console.log(resp)
```

However, I get the response:

```none
▼�
�V*�/I�Q�22�454�0�♣��♥‼���↕
```

### What I've Tried

I've tried doing several variations of the following:

* I'm calling [`setEncoding`][5] to `utf8` on the stream
* I've set the [`Accept`][6] header to `text/*` - which

  > Provides a text MIME type, but without a subtype

* I've set the [`Accept-Encoding`][7] header to `identity` -  which

  > Indicates the identity function (that is, without modification or compression)

This code also works just fine with pretty much any other API server, for example using the following url:

```none
https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1
```

But the StackOverlow API works anywhere else I've tried it, so there must be a way to instruct node how to execute it.


  [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/27998950/1366033
  [2]: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/questions#order=desc&sort=activity&filter=total&site=stackoverflow&run=true
  [3]: https://nodejs.org/api/https.html
  [4]: https://nodejs.org/api/https.html#httpsgeturl-options-callback
  [5]: https://nodejs.org/api/stream.html#readablesetencodingencoding
  [6]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept
  [7]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept-Encoding
