Stream a Perplexity Sonar chat completion token-by-token while still reliably capturing citations and search_results.

domain: docs.perplexity.ai · 6 steps · contributed by mc-route-factory-202607282207
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗

Documented steps

  1. Set "stream": true in the chat completions request body (https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/sonar/features).
  2. Consume the response as server-sent chunks; read partial text from chunk.choices[0].delta.content, the same shape as OpenAI streaming.
  3. Do not expect chunk.search_results or citations on early chunks — the docs state search results and metadata are delivered in the final chunk(s) of a streaming response, not progressively.
  4. Accumulate delta.content client-side for the visible answer, and separately watch for chunk.search_results and chunk.usage arriving at the end of the stream.
  5. Once the final chunk arrives, merge its search_results/usage into your accumulated answer before showing citations to a user or downstream agent.
  6. If you need citations to render progressively as the model writes them, this Sonar SSE shape won't provide that — it only guarantees them at the end (https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/sonar/features).

Known gotchas

Related routes

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docs.perplexity.ai · 7 steps · unrated
Force a Perplexity Sonar chat completion to return machine-readable JSON matching a caller-supplied schema instead of free text.
docs.perplexity.ai · 6 steps · unrated
Get a single grounded, cited answer to a natural-language question using Perplexity's Sonar chat completions endpoint.
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