How to return a variable from an async function?

Question

I'm trying to learn async functions and am struggling to get the following to work.

async get_price(ticker) {
  var price = await axios
    .get(`https://marketwebsite.com/${ticker}`, {
      headers: {
        "User-Agent":
          "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.4844.74 Safari/537.36",
      },
    })
    .then((res) => {
      const $ = cheerio.load(res.data);
      $(".todays_price").each((index, element) => {
        var value = $(element)
          .find(".current_price")
          .text()
          .replace(/\s\s+/g, "");
        return value;
        console.log(value); // THIS WORKS
      });
    })
    .catch((err) => console.error(err));
}

When i call

var price = get_price(symbol); 

I cannot get any return from this function. The console log noted above does work, however i cannot get the value to return from this function.

I have tried to await get_price(symbol) as well.

Answer 1

There are a few issues in your snippet including:

• You are not returning price from your get_price function
• You are not returning anything in your .then() call

Try the following snippet:

async function get_price(ticker) {
  return await axios
    .get(`https://marketwebsite.com/${ticker}`)
    .then((res) => {
      const $ = cheerio.load(res.data);
      return $(".todays_price").map((index, element) => {
        var value = $(element)
          .find(".current_price")
          .text()
          .replace(/\s\s+/g, "");
        return value;
      });
    })
    .catch((err) => console.error(err));
}

get_price('ticker').then((res) => {
  console.log(res); // Should print array of the values
});

I've used the jQuery .map method as it seems like you intended to return the values for each element.

I suggest going through the documentation on async await and promises on the MDN docs. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Promise https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/async_function