How to Convert HTTP Status Codes to statusText in Javascript

Table of Contents

Have you ever had a 3rd-party API that sends empty response.statusText messages? Not knowing what codes mean when they happen can be frustrating for users when they are given a status code with no description of what it means.

While many situations often call for a custom domain-specific error message, it can still be helpful to use the HTTP code’s statusText as a fallback. That way the user is never presented with something like “HTTP error code 500” without knowing an Internal Server Error occured.

The following function will return a description for any standard HTTP status code:

function getStatusText(code) {
    return {
        100: "Continue",
        101: "Switching Protocols",
        102: "Processing",
        200: "OK",
        201: "Created",
        202: "Accepted",
        203: "Non-authoritative Information",
        204: "No Content",
        205: "Reset Content",
        206: "Partial Content",
        207: "Multi-Status",
        208: "Already Reported",
        226: "IM Used",
        300: "Multiple Choices",
        301: "Moved Permanently",
        302: "Found",
        303: "See Other",
        304: "Not Modified",
        305: "Use Proxy",
        307: "Temporary Redirect",
        308: "Permanent Redirect",
        400: "Bad Request",
        401: "Unauthorized",
        402: "Payment Required",
        403: "Forbidden",
        404: "Not Found",
        405: "Method Not Allowed",
        406: "Not Acceptable",
        407: "Proxy Authentication Required",
        408: "Request Timeout",
        409: "Conflict",
        410: "Gone",
        411: "Length Required",
        412: "Precondition Failed",
        413: "Payload Too Large",
        414: "Request-URI Too Long",
        415: "Unsupported Media Type",
        416: "Requested Range Not Satisfiable",
        417: "Expectation Failed",
        418: "I'm a teapot",
        421: "Misdirected Request",
        422: "Unprocessable Entity",
        423: "Locked",
        424: "Failed Dependency",
        426: "Upgrade Required",
        428: "Precondition Required",
        429: "Too Many Requests",
        431: "Request Header Fields Too Large",
        444: "Connection Closed Without Response",
        451: "Unavailable For Legal Reasons",
        499: "Client Closed Request",
        500: "Internal Server Error",
        501: "Not Implemented",
        502: "Bad Gateway",
        503: "Service Unavailable",
        504: "Gateway Timeout",
        505: "HTTP Version Not Supported",
        506: "Variant Also Negotiates",
        507: "Insufficient Storage",
        508: "Loop Detected",
        510: "Not Extended",
        511: "Network Authentication Required",
        599: "Network Connect Timeout Error"
    }[code] || ''
}

Example Output

// Prints "Not Found"
console.log(getStatusText(404))

Hope this helps!