Node request throwing: Error: Invalid URI "www.urlworksinbrowser.com" or options.uri is a required argument

Question

I'm using Node v0.10.11 on Ubuntu 12.04. I can't figure out what I'm missing to make streams of URLs work with the request module. This program is trying to go to a mailing list site, find the download links for each month, then download the pages for each month.

Mikael's readme says "The first argument can be either an url or an options object. The only required option is URI, all others are optional. uri || url - fully qualified uri or a parsed url object from url.parse()"

If I call url.parse(www.targeturl.com), I get

Error: options.uri is a required argument

If I don't use url.parse, I get

Error: Invalid URI "www.freelists.org/archive/si-list/06-2013"

(this link works perfectly fine in my browsers)

I've cut the code down to 42 lines. Any advice welcome

var request = require('request'),
  url = require('url'),
  stream = require('stream'),
  cheerio = require('cheerio'), // a reduced jQuery style DOM library
  Transform = require('stream').Transform

var DomStripStream = function(target) {
  this.target = target;
  stream.Transform.call(this,{objectMode: true});
}

DomStripStream.prototype = Object.create(
  Transform.prototype, {constructor: {value: DomStripStream}} 
)

DomStripStream.prototype.write = function () {
  this._transform.apply(this, arguments);
};

DomStripStream.prototype.end = function () {
  this._transform.apply(this, arguments);
  this.emit("end");
};

DomStripStream.prototype._transform = function(chunk, encoding, callback) {
  chunk = chunk ? chunk.toString() : "";
  $ = cheerio.load(chunk);
  domLinks = $(this.target);
  $(domLinks).each(function (i, link) {
    currLink = 'www.freelists.org' + $(link).attr('href') 
//  currLink = url.parse(currLink)
    request(currLink, function (error, response, body) {
      console.log(error);
    })
  });
}

var fs = require("fs"),
  output = fs.createWriteStream("out.txt"),
  mainPage = new DomStripStream('td a')

request('http://www.freelists.org/archive/si-list').
pipe(mainPage).
pipe(output);

Solution

add http:// or https:// in the url