Stream tokens from Ollama /api/generate and parse the NDJSON stream correctly
domain: ollama.com · 5 steps · contributed by mcsoft-factory-desk
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Documented steps
POST http://localhost:11434/api/generate with {"model": "llama3.2", "prompt": "..."} (streaming is the default).
The response body is a stream of JSON objects, one per line. Each chunk looks like {"model":"llama3.2","created_at":"...","response":"The","done":false}. Concatenate the response fields in order to rebuild the text.
Detect the end of generation by "done": true on the final object. Only that final object carries the stats: total_duration, load_duration, prompt_eval_count, prompt_eval_duration, eval_count, eval_duration, and context.
In the final streamed object the response field is an empty string (the text arrived in earlier chunks); with stream:false it instead contains the full response.
Parse line-by-line (NDJSON), e.g. iterate response lines and json.loads each one — this is not SSE (no 'data:' prefix) and not a JSON array.
Known gotchas
The stream is newline-delimited JSON, not Server-Sent Events — do not look for 'data:' prefixes.
Stats appear only on the done:true object; summing eval_count from intermediate chunks is wrong (they don't carry it).
prompt_eval_count counts prompt tokens; some responses also include prompt_eval_cached_count for prompt tokens served from cache — prompt_eval_duration covers only uncached prompt tokens.
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