I am trying to manage my node package dependencies. I'd like to be able to install all the required dependencies by running a command, and from what I have read, one way to achieve this is using a package.json file and running npm install. So my JSON file looks like this:
{
"name": "Name-Of-The-Thing",
"description": "The Thing's Name",
"author": "The Dude <[email protected]>",
"dependencies": {
"mocha":">= 1.12.0",
"mocha-phantomjs":">= 3.1.0",
"chai":">= 1.7.2",
"phantomjs":">= 1.9.1"
}
}
However npm install reports the following error:
npm ERR! Failed to parse json
npm ERR! Unexpected token ?
npm ERR! File: C:\Path\To\The\Thing\package.json
npm ERR! Failed to parse package.json data.
npm ERR! package.json must be actual JSON, not just JavaScript.
npm ERR!
npm ERR! This is not a bug in npm.
npm ERR! Tell the package author to fix their package.json file. JSON.parse
npm ERR! System Windows_NT 6.2.9200
npm ERR! command "C:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\\\node.exe" "C:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\node_modules\\npm\\bin\\npm-cli.js" "test"
npm ERR! cwd C:\Path\To\The\Thing
npm ERR! node -v v0.8.15
npm ERR! npm -v 1.1.66
npm ERR! file C:\Path\To\The\Thing\package.json
npm ERR! code EJSONPARSE
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in:
npm ERR! C:\Path\To\The\Thing\npm-debug.log
npm ERR! not ok code 0
Anyone know why?
Proper answer:
Your editor adds a byte-order-mark to the JSON file, which makes the octet-stream an invalid JSON text.
JSON RFC says:
JSON text SHALL be encoded in Unicode. The default encoding is UTF-8.
Since the first two characters of a JSON text will always be ASCII characters [RFC0020], it is possible to determine whether an octet stream is UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE or LE), or UTF-32 (BE or LE) by looking at the pattern of nulls in the first four octets.
00 00 00 xx UTF-32BE 00 xx 00 xx UTF-16BE xx 00 00 00 UTF-32LE xx 00 xx 00 UTF-16LE xx xx xx xx UTF-8
The bug report you mentioned has been closed for this reason.
From my understanding, any valid ASCII encoded text also happens to be valid UTF-8, so together with the absence of the BOM it explains why it now works as expected.
In general, I think you should set up your text editor to save files in UTF-8, without a byte-order-mark. See What's different between UTF-8 and UTF-8 without BOM? for discussion. Per What encoding is expected for Node.js source code? , Node.js would accept non-ASCII characters in JS source files encoded this way. This can be handy when you want to embed a non-ASCII string somewhere in the source code.
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