Storing the contents of an axios response into a variable in typescript [duplicate]

I’m relatively new to javascript and typescript in general and am struggling to understand the concept of async/await and Promises. (My knowledge is more Python based)

I am trying to make sense of why this function won’t work.

const getData = () => {
  var myData: string;

  axios.get(myEndPoint)
  .then((response) => {
    console.log(response.data) // this outputs the correct data
    myData = response.data
    return myData
  })
  .catch((error) => {
    return error
  });

And then outside this function I would like to get the contents of myData like so

const data_contents = getData()

However this would give me a value of undefined

I have tried various methods including changing the function getData() to an async function and declaring await for axios.get() however that would return a Promise {<pending>} instead and not the actual contents of response.data.

If someone could help explain what I’m doing wrong and point me in the right direction it would be really appreciated. Thanks a lot!