As in real-life plumbing, Node.js streams also can be piped together following different patterns; we can, in fact, merge the flow of two different streams into one, split the flow of one stream into two or more pipes, or redirect the flow based on a condition. In this section, we are going to explore the most important plumbing techniques that can be applied to Node.js streams.
In this chapter, we have stressed a lot on the fact that streams provide a simple infrastructure to modularize and reuse our code, but there is one last piece missing in this puzzle: what if we want to modularize and reuse an entire pipeline? What if we want to combine multiple streams so that they look like one from the outside? The following figure shows what this means:
From the preceding diagram, we should already get a hint of how this works:
When we write into the combined stream, we are actually writing into the first stream of the pipeline
When we read from the combined stream...