I've been bitten by this feature as well in the past...

Responses from the API are [compressed with GZIP](https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/compression) (by default; you can request DEFLATE as well). Your browser  automatically knows how to handle this; with most development libraries you have to specify *explicitly* that you want support for compression.

I don't have experience with the 'request' library in NodeJS, but the solution in [this Stack Overflow answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/14739453/4751173) should work. You don't need to add the `'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip'` header, though.