Ошибка syntaxerror unexpected token in json at position 0

In a React app component which handles Facebook-like content feeds, I am running into an error:

Feed.js:94 undefined «parsererror» «SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0

I ran into a similar error which turned out to be a typo in the HTML within the render function, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

More confusingly, I rolled the code back to an earlier, known-working version and I’m still getting the error.

Feed.js:

import React from 'react';

var ThreadForm = React.createClass({
  getInitialState: function () {
    return {author: '', 
            text: '', 
            included: '',
            victim: ''
            }
  },
  handleAuthorChange: function (e) {
    this.setState({author: e.target.value})
  },
  handleTextChange: function (e) {
    this.setState({text: e.target.value})
  },
  handleIncludedChange: function (e) {
    this.setState({included: e.target.value})
  },
  handleVictimChange: function (e) {
    this.setState({victim: e.target.value})
  },
  handleSubmit: function (e) {
    e.preventDefault()
    var author = this.state.author.trim()
    var text = this.state.text.trim()
    var included = this.state.included.trim()
    var victim = this.state.victim.trim()
    if (!text || !author || !included || !victim) {
      return
    }
    this.props.onThreadSubmit({author: author, 
                                text: text, 
                                included: included,
                                victim: victim
                              })
    this.setState({author: '', 
                  text: '', 
                  included: '',
                  victim: ''
                  })
  },
  render: function () {
    return (
    <form className="threadForm" onSubmit={this.handleSubmit}>
      <input
        type="text"
        placeholder="Your name"
        value={this.state.author}
        onChange={this.handleAuthorChange} />
      <input
        type="text"
        placeholder="Say something..."
        value={this.state.text}
        onChange={this.handleTextChange} />
      <input
        type="text"
        placeholder="Name your victim"
        value={this.state.victim}
        onChange={this.handleVictimChange} />
      <input
        type="text"
        placeholder="Who can see?"
        value={this.state.included}
        onChange={this.handleIncludedChange} />
      <input type="submit" value="Post" />
    </form>
    )
  }
})

var ThreadsBox = React.createClass({
  loadThreadsFromServer: function () {
    $.ajax({
      url: this.props.url,
      dataType: 'json',
      cache: false,
      success: function (data) {
        this.setState({data: data})
      }.bind(this),
      error: function (xhr, status, err) {
        console.error(this.props.url, status, err.toString())
      }.bind(this)
    })
  },
  handleThreadSubmit: function (thread) {
    var threads = this.state.data
    var newThreads = threads.concat([thread])
    this.setState({data: newThreads})
    $.ajax({
      url: this.props.url,
      dataType: 'json',
      type: 'POST',
      data: thread,
      success: function (data) {
        this.setState({data: data})
      }.bind(this),
      error: function (xhr, status, err) {
        this.setState({data: threads})
        console.error(this.props.url, status, err.toString())
      }.bind(this)
    })
  },
  getInitialState: function () {
    return {data: []}
  },
  componentDidMount: function () {
    this.loadThreadsFromServer()
    setInterval(this.loadThreadsFromServer, this.props.pollInterval)
  },
  render: function () {
    return (
    <div className="threadsBox">
      <h1>Feed</h1>
      <div>
        <ThreadForm onThreadSubmit={this.handleThreadSubmit} />
      </div>
    </div>
    )
  }
})

module.exports = ThreadsBox

In Chrome developer tools, the error seems to be coming from this function:

 loadThreadsFromServer: function loadThreadsFromServer() {
    $.ajax({
      url: this.props.url,
      dataType: 'json',
      cache: false,
      success: function (data) {
        this.setState({ data: data });
      }.bind(this),
      error: function (xhr, status, err) {
        console.error(this.props.url, status, err.toString());
      }.bind(this)
    });
  },

with the line console.error(this.props.url, status, err.toString() underlined.

Since it looks like the error seems to have something to do with pulling JSON data from the server, I tried starting from a blank db, but the error persists. The error seems to be called in an infinite loop presumably as React continuously tries to connect to the server and eventually crashes the browser.

EDIT:

I’ve checked the server response with Chrome dev tools and Chrome REST client, and the data appears to be proper JSON.

EDIT 2:

It appears that though the intended API endpoint is indeed returning the correct JSON data and format, React is polling http://localhost:3000/?_=1463499798727 instead of the expected http://localhost:3001/api/threads.

I am running a webpack hot-reload server on port 3000 with the express app running on port 3001 to return the backend data. What’s frustrating here is that this was working correctly the last time I worked on it and can’t find what I could have possibly changed to break it.

Unhandled Rejection (SyntaxError): Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0

You made an HTTP request, probably with Fetch, and it blew up with this error. Or a very similar one.

Ugh.

Here’s what causes it and how to fix it.

Read on for a quick suggestion, and watch the video for a walkthrough of a few techniques you can try to debug this in your own app.

The Cause

This happens when you make a request to the server and parse the response as JSON, but it’s not JSON. The code responsible might look something like this:

fetch('/users').then(res => res.json())

The actual request worked fine. It got a response. But the res.json() is what failed.

JSON.parse

You might instead be parsing the JSON yourself with JSON.parse like this:

JSON.parse(theStringThatIsNotJson);

JSON.parse is what fetch’s res.json() is doing under the hood, so the error will be the same either way.

Valid JSON

JSON should start with a valid JSON value – an object, array, string, number, or false/true/null. This response started with a < (hence the “Unexpected token <”).

That unexpected token, <, is a strong clue that the response was HTML instead of JSON.

The root cause is that the server returned HTML or some other non-JSON string. Why would it do that?

“Unexpected token o in JSON at position 1” and other varieties

The exact text of this error will differ depending on what the server returned. The token and the position may vary, but the root cause is the same: the text that your app is trying to parse as JSON is not actually valid JSON.

Here are some other variations I’ve seen…

• Unexpected token < in JSON at position 1
• Unexpected token p in JSON at position 0
• Unexpected token d in JSON at position 0

Watch the video above for how this error works, and how to use your browser’s developer tools to figure out exactly what’s causing it. (or keep on readin’)

The Fix

The first thing to do is try logging it out. With fetch, you can use res.text() instead of res.json() to get the text string itself. Alter your code to read something like this, and check the console to see what’s causing the problem:

fetch('/users')
  // .then(res => res.json()) // comment this out for now
  .then(res => res.text())          // convert to plain text
  .then(text => console.log(text))  // then log it out

Note that these res.json() and res.text() functions are asynchronous, so you cannot log their return value directly. That’s why the console.log must be in a separate .then block.

Fix JSON.parse Unexpected Token

If you’re using JSON.parse directly, that’s a plain old synchronous call and you can replace the call with a console.log to see what’s going on.

// JSON.parse(someString)  // comment this out temporarily
console.log(someString)    // log out out, and see what's wrong

Blame the Server?

The server might return HTML instead of JSON for a bunch of reasons:

• The URL doesn’t exist and the server returned an 404 page as HTML. You might have a typo in the client code (/users instead of /user) or in the server code that sets up the route.
• The server might need a restart if you just added a URL to it. If you’re using an Express server for instance, and you just added a new app.get('/users', ...) route, but didn’t restart the server, then it doesn’t know about the new route yet.
• The client’s proxy isn’t set up: if you’re using a Webpack dev server like Create React App, you can set up a proxy to forward requests to a backend server.
• The API root URL is /: If you’re using a proxy through Webpack or Create React App, make sure your API route is not at the root level /. That’ll confuse the proxy and you’ll get back HTML instead of your API request. Instead, prefix the route with something like /api/.

Also, check the browser devtools Network tab and look for the request that caused this error, and then look at the response that came back.

Is it a 404 page? (might be a missing route or a typo)

Is it the index.html page? (might be a missing route or a misconfigured proxy)

If everything looks fine, then restart your backend server and your frontend dev server, and see if the problem goes away.

Problem Solved?

Hopefully you’ve now gotten rid of the error. If not, leave a comment below with what you tried.

Introduction

A common issue that I see when working with front-end JavaScript heavy apps is the dreaded “SyntaxError Unexpected Token in JSON” error! Now this error can be of the form:

SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0

SyntaxError: Unexpected end of JSON input

syntaxerror: unexpected token '<', "<!doctype "... is not valid json

The error “SyntaxError Unexpected Token in JSON” appears when you try to parse content (for example — data from a database, api, etc), but the content itself is not JSON (could be XML, HTML, CSV) or invalid JSON containing unescaped characters, missing commas and brackets.

There are a few things you can try to fix this error:

1. Check that the content you are trying to parse is JSON format and not HTML or XML

2. Verify that there are no missing or extra commas.

3. Make sure to check for unescaped special characters.

4. Check for mismatched brackets or quotes.

5. Make sure the JSON is valid. You can use a tool like JSONLint to validate your JSON and check for any errors.

1. Check that the content you are trying to parse is JSON format and not HTML or XML

A common reason why the error “SyntaxError Unexpected Token in JSON” comes up is that we are trying to parse content that is not even JSON.

Consider the following front-end JavaScript code:

  

fetch('https://localhost:3000/data')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => {
    console.log(data);
    // Use the data here
  })

In the above example, the fetch() function is being used to retrieve data from a API that returns JSON format — in this case https://localhost:3000/data.

The fetch() function then returns a promise, and when that promise resolves, we handle that with the response.json() method. This just takes our JSON response and converts it to a JSON object to be used!

After that we just console.log out the data object

Now for the server-side of things, look on to our Node JS route that returns the JSON /data

  

var http = require('http');

var app = http.createServer(function(req,res){
    res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/html'); ❌ Not returning JSON.
    res.end(JSON.stringify({ a: 1 }));
});
app.listen(3000);

We can see that it is setting the Header as text/html. This will give you the error:

syntaxerror: unexpected token '<', "<!doctype "... is not valid json

This is because we are trying to parse the content with JSON.parse() or in our case response.json() and receiving a HTML file!

To fix this, we just need to change the returned header to res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json'):

  

...
var app = http.createServer(function(req,res){
    res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json'); ✔️ Returning JSON.
    res.end(JSON.stringify({ a: 1 }));
});
...

Whats Content-Type request header anyway?

Pretty much every resource on the internet will need to have a type (similar to how your file system contains file types like images, videos, text, etc).
This is known as a MIME type (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension)

Browsers need to know what content type a resource is so that it can best handle it. Most modern browsers are becoming good at figuring out which content type a resource is, but its not always 100% correct.

That is why still need to explicitly specify our request header content-type!

syntaxerror: unexpected token ‘<’, “<!doctype “… is not valid json

This error also comes up when your API is returning invalid error pages such as 404/500 HTML pages. Since HTML usually starts with a “less than” tag symbol (<) and JSON is not valid with < tags, it will through this error.

For example, when everything is working find, your node API will happily return JSON. However when it fails with a 500 internal error, it could return a custom HTML error page!
In this case, when you try to do JSON.parse(data) you will get the syntaxerror: unexpected token '<', "<!doctype "... is not valid json.

Additionally, check that you are calling the correct API url. As an example, lets say the API that returns JSON is using the /data route. If you misspelt this, you could be redirected to a 404 HTML page instead!

Tip: Use appropriate error handlers for non-JSON data

If you are using fetch() to retrieve your data, we can add a catch handler to give meaningful error messages to the user:

  

fetch('https://localhost:3000/data')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => {
    console.log(data);
    // Use the data here
  })
  .catch(error => console.error(error)); /*✔️ Friendly error message for debugging! */

If you are using JSON.parse() we can do this in a try/catch block as follows:

  

try {
    JSON.parse(data);
}
catch (error) {
    console.log('Error parsing JSON:', error, data); /*✔️ Friendly message for debugging ! */
}

JSON objects and arrays should have a comma between each item, except for the last one.

  

{
    "name": "John Smith"
    "age": 30
    "address": {
        "street": "123 Main St"
        "city": "Anytown"
        "state": "USA"
    }
}

This JSON object will throw a “syntaxerror unexpected token” error because there is no comma between “John Smith” and “age”, and also between “Anytown” and “state”.

To fix this, you would add commas as follows:

  

{
    "name": "John Smith",
    "age": 30,
    "address": {
        "street": "123 Main St",
        "city": "Anytown",
        "state": "USA"
    }
}

By adding commas between each item except for the last one, the JSON object is now in the correct format and should parse without error.

3. Make sure to use double quotes and escape special characters.

JSON strings must be wrapped in double quotes, and any special characters within the string must be properly escaped. Consider the following example:

  

{
    "name": "John Smith",
    "age": 30,
    "address": {
        "street": "123 Main St",
        "city": "Anytown",
        "state": "USA"
    },
    "message": "It's a lovely day"
}

When we try to parse this with JSON.parse, we will get the error: SyntaxError: Invalid or unexpected token.

The problem is with the following line using a apostrophe:

"message": "It's a lovely day"

  

{
    "name": "John Smith",
    "age": 30,
    "address": {
        "street": "123 Main St",
        "city": "Anytown",
        "state": "USA"
    },
    "message": "It's a lovely day"
}

As we can see, this will fix our error since we escape the aspostrophe as such:

"message": "It's a lovely day"

4. Check for mismatched brackets or quotes.

Make sure all brackets and quotes are properly closed and match up.

  

{
    "name": "John Smith",
    "age": 30,
    "address": {
        "street": "123 Main St",
        "city": "Anytown",
        "state": "USA"
    }

In this example, the JSON object is missing a closing curly bracket, which indicates the end of the object. Because of this, it will throw a “syntaxerror unexpected token” error.

To fix this, you would add the missing closing curly bracket as follows:

  

{
    "name": "John Smith",
    "age": 30,
    "address": {
        "street": "123 Main St",
        "city": "Anytown",
        "state": "USA"
    }
}

If you want to be sure that the JSON is valid, we can try to use the NPM package JSONLint (https://github.com/zaach/jsonlint)

We can install jsonlint with npm as follows:

1. Open up the terminal
2. Run NPM install npm install jsonlint -g
3. We can then validate a file like so: jsonlint myfile.json

Summary

In this article I went over the SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0 when dealing with parsing JSON with fetch or JSON.parse. This error is mainly due to the JSON not being in correct format or the content that we are trying to parse is not even JSON.

In the case of JSON being invalid, make sure to check for unescaped characters, missing commas, non-matching brackets and quotes.

To be really sure, check the JSON with tools like JSONLint to validate!

In the case of the content you are trying to parse being non-JSON such as HTML, check your API to make sure that error pages return JSON correctly instead of HTML pages.

This guide will help you to fix SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0. This guide also applies to these other common variants of the same error:

• SyntaxError: The string did not match the expected pattern.

• SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

• JSON parse error: Unrecognised token '<'

Summary

These errors indicate that your JavaScript code expected to receive JSON but got something else instead (probably HTML in the form of a server-side error). To fix the issue, you need to examine what you got instead of the expected JSON to determine what the problem is.

Details

Usually, this error is caused when your server returns HTML (which typically begins with <DOCTYPE html> or <html>) instead of JSON. Valid JSON cannot begin with a < character, so the JSON parser knows immediately that the data isn’t valid JSON and produces one of the error messages mentioned above.

To fix this error, you need to figure out why you’re getting HTML (or something else) instead of the JSON you expected. To do this, you need to log the data that you’re trying to parse to the console.

If you’re using fetch()

Use this approach if your code looks something like this:

fetch('https://example.com/some/path/to/json')
.then(function (response) {
    return response.json();
})
.then(function (data) {
    // Do something with data
});

In this case, the error is thrown when response.json() tries to run and fails to parse the data from the server as JSON. You can add a function to handle the error, display the raw text of the response body from the server and log it to the console (see notes about commented lines below):

var responseClone; // 1
fetch('https://example.com/some/path/to/json')
.then(function (response) {
    responseClone = response.clone(); // 2
    return response.json();
})
.then(function (data) {
    // Do something with data
}, function (rejectionReason) { // 3
    console.log('Error parsing JSON from response:', rejectionReason, responseClone); // 4
    responseClone.text() // 5
    .then(function (bodyText) {
        console.log('Received the following instead of valid JSON:', bodyText); // 6
    });
});

Here’s an explanation of each line with a numbered comment:

1. A responseClone variable is required to hold a clone of the response object because the body of a response can only be read once. When response.json() is called, the body of the original response is read, which means it cannot be read again while handling the JSON parse error. Cloning the response to responseClone provides two copies of the response body to work with; one in the original response to use with response.json() and another to use with responseClone.text() if response.json() fails.

2. This line populates the responseClone variable with a clone of the response received from the server.

3. A second function argument is passed to the then() function that follows the response.json() call. This second function will be called if the promise from response.json() is rejected (i.e. a JSON error is encountered).

4. This line logs the rejectionReason from the rejected response.json() promise and the responseClone so it can be examined if needed (the HTTP status code is often useful for debugging, for example).

5. Instead of trying to parse the response body from the server as JSON, it is processed as raw text.

6. The body text is logged to the console for examination.

If you’re using JSON.parse()

Use this method if the code that’s throwing the error looks like this:

JSON.parse(data);

In this case, you can log the data to the console if an error is encountered to see what it contains:

try {
    JSON.parse(data);
}
catch (error) {
    console.log('Error parsing JSON:', error, data);
}

What do I do next?

Once you can see the data that’s causing the JSON parse error, it will hopefully provide a clue as to why you’re not getting the valid JSON you expect. Some of the most common issues that lead to this error are:

• If you see HTML indicating a 404 Not Found error instead of the JSON you expect, check the URL you’re passing to fetch() and make sure that it’s correct.

• If you see HTML indicating a server error (such as a 500 error code), examine your server’s error logs to determine why your server is encountering an error instead of providing the JSON you expect.

• If you cannot see anything or if you have an unusual jumble of characters, check your variable assignments and character encodings.

The «Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0» is a typically Javascript error that will show up in your console log if the client has been directed to execute JSON.parse() on a string beginning with u instead of a stringified object. «u» is typically a stringified version of the undefined primitive.

This resource will show you how to fix the «Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0» error and is updated for 2023.

If you run the following code in your console browser, you’ll get the SyntaxError.

JSON.parse(undefined)

When parsed, undefined is converted into u, which is then defined as the token in the error message of «Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0».

The Cause

This error is caused when you are attempting to parse a non-existent property. Typically, this is due to a misspelling, or simply referencing the wrong property (one that is not parsable).

my.data = ‘{«some»:»data»}’;
JSON.parse(my.date)

Notice the error? my.data is what we’re trying to parse, but due to a typo, we’re referencing a non-existent property, my.date, which is undefined. That means that there’s an «unexpected token u in JSON at position 0».

Another less common cause of this error is not even receiving the JSON. This might be caused by a client side script that ignores errors and sends requests when they shouldn’t. As there’s no data to send to the request, you’ll get an error each time this occurs.

The third cause of this error may be attempting to use JSON.parse() on data that contains an emoji.

The Fix(s)

From the causes, we can see that the fix for the Syntax Error «Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0» is relatively simple.

Ensure that you’re pulling data from the right place. If the data does not exist, then the error will occur.

Ensure that the data is a valid JSON. If it is not, the error will occur. You can check the validity and formatting by using a tool like: https://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/.

Remove white space, which may corrupt your data. Here’s an example:

data = data.trim(); // remove the unwanted whitespace
theOutput = JSON.parse(data);

If you are using localstorage to store your data, clear it (browser console -> localStorage.clear()) and try again (remember to rewrite your data if this was done manually).

If you’re using an emoji in the data, the simplest fix is to remove it. But if you must use an emoji, there are language-specific methods of encoding and decoding emojis to insure that they work with JSON.parse.

You may also want to delay receiving your data until the page or window is loaded by using window.onload (or with jQuery, $(document).ready()).

We hope this article helped you fix the «Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0» error. If you have any other questions, thoughts, or helpful tips around this topic, feel free to comment them below.