The content is gzipped. You can use request
and zlib
to decompress a streamed response from the API:
var request = require('request')
,zlib = require('zlib');
var url = 'http://api.stackexchange.com/2.1/questions?pagesize=100&fromdate=1356998400&todate=1359676800&order=desc&min=0&sort=votes&tagged=javascript&site=stackoverflow';
request({ url: url, headers: {'accept-encoding': 'gzip'}})
.pipe(zlib.createGunzip())
.pipe(process.stdout); // not gibberish
Further Reading: Easy HTTP requests with gzip/deflate compression