256
votes

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.

30
That suggests that your "JSON" is actually HTML. Look at the data you are getting back from the server. - Quentin
This is the error you get if you do something like JSON.parse("<foo>") -- a JSON string (which you expect with dataType: 'json') cannot begin with <. - apsillers
As @quantin said, it can be html, maybe error of some sort, try the same url with some rest clients - maurycy
like I mentioned, i tried it with an empty db (which returns simply []) and it still gives the same error - Cameron Sima
You most likely need to proxy API requests depending on your NODE_ENV. See this: github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app/blob/master/… - Kevin Suttle

30 Answers

188
votes

The wording of the error message corresponds to what you get from Google Chrome when you run JSON.parse('<...'). I know you said the server is setting Content-Type:application/json, but I am led to believe the response body is actually HTML.

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

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

The err was actually thrown within jQuery, and passed to you as a variable err. The reason that line is underlined is simply because that is where you are logging it.

I would suggest that you add to your logging. Looking at the actual xhr (XMLHttpRequest) properties to learn more about the response. Try adding console.warn(xhr.responseText) and you will most likely see the HTML that is being received.

70
votes

You're receiving HTML (or XML) back from the server, but the dataType: json is telling jQuery to parse as JSON. Check the "Network" tab in Chrome dev tools to see contents of the server's response.

15
votes

This ended up being a permissions problem for me. I was trying to access a url I didn't have authorization for with cancan, so the url was switched to users/sign_in. the redirected url responds to html, not json. The first character in a html response is <.

9
votes

I experienced this error "SyntaxError: Unexpected token m in JSON at position", where the token 'm' can be any other characters.

It turned out that I missed one of the double quotes in the JSON object when I was using RESTconsole for DB test, as {"name: "math"}, the correct one should be {"name": "math"}

It took me a lot effort to figure out this clumsy mistake. I am afraid others would run into similar bummers.

8
votes

In my case, I was getting this running webpack, and it turned out to be some corruption somewhere in the local node_modules dir.

rm -rf node_modules
npm install

...was enough to get it working right again.

8
votes

This error occurs when you define the response as application/json and you are getting a HTML as a response. Basically, this happened when you are writing server side script for specific url with a response of JSON but the error format is in HTML.

5
votes

i was facing the same issue
i removed the dataType:'json' from the $.ajax method

4
votes

I my case the error was a result of me not assigning my return value to a variable. The following caused the error message:

return new JavaScriptSerializer().Serialize("hello");

I changed it to:

string H = "hello";
return new JavaScriptSerializer().Serialize(H);

Without the variable JSON is unable to properly format the data.

3
votes

For future googlers:

This message will be generated if the server-side function crashes.

Or if the server-side function doesn't even exist ( i.e. Typo in function name ).

So - suppose you are using a GET request... and everything looks perfect and you've triple-checked everything...

Check that GET string one more time. Mine was:

'/theRouteIWant&someVar=Some value to send'

should be

'/theRouteIWant?someVar=Some value to send'
               ^

CrAsH !       ( ... invisibly, on the server ...)

Node/Express sends back the incredibly helpful message:
Uncaught (in promise) SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0

2
votes

My problem was that I was getting the data back in a string which was not in a proper JSON format, which I was then trying to parse it. simple example: JSON.parse('{hello there}') will give an error at h. In my case the callback url was returning an unnecessary character before the objects: employee_names([{"name":.... and was getting error at e at 0. My callback URL itself had an issue which when fixed, returned only objects.

2
votes

On a general level this error occurs when a JSON object is parsed that has syntax errors in it. Think of something like this, where the message property contains unescaped double quotes:

{
    "data": [{
        "code": "1",
        "message": "This message has "unescaped" quotes, which is a JSON syntax error."
    }]
}

If you have JSON in your app somewhere then it's good to run it through JSONLint to verify that it doesn't have a syntax error. Usually this isn't the case though in my experience, it's usually JSON returned from an API that's the culprit.

When an XHR request is made to an HTTP API that returns a response with a Content-Type:application/json; charset=UTF-8 header which contains invalid JSON in the response body you'll see this error.

If a server-side API controller is improperly handling a syntax error, and it's being printed out as part of the response, that will break the structure of JSON returned. A good example of this would be an API response containing a PHP Warning or Notice in the response body:

<b>Notice</b>:  Undefined variable: something in <b>/path/to/some-api-controller.php</b> on line <b>99</b><br />
{
    "success": false,
    "data": [{ ... }]
}

95% of the time this is the source of the issue for me, and though it's somewhat addressed here in the other responses I didn't feel it was clearly described. Hopefully this helps, if you're looking for a handy way to track down which API response contains a JSON syntax error I've written an Angular module for that.

Here's the module:

/**
 * Track Incomplete XHR Requests
 * 
 * Extend httpInterceptor to track XHR completions and keep a queue 
 * of our HTTP requests in order to find if any are incomplete or 
 * never finish, usually this is the source  of the issue if it's 
 * XHR related
 */
angular.module( "xhrErrorTracking", [
        'ng',
        'ngResource'
    ] )
    .factory( 'xhrErrorTracking', [ '$q', function( $q ) {
        var currentResponse = false;

        return {
            response: function( response ) {
                currentResponse = response;
                return response || $q.when( response );
            },
            responseError: function( rejection ) {
                var requestDesc = currentResponse.config.method + ' ' + currentResponse.config.url;
                if ( currentResponse.config.params ) requestDesc += ' ' + JSON.stringify( currentResponse.config.params );

                console.warn( 'JSON Errors Found in XHR Response: ' + requestDesc, currentResponse );

                return $q.reject( rejection );
            }
        };
    } ] )
    .config( [ '$httpProvider', function( $httpProvider ) {
        $httpProvider.interceptors.push( 'xhrErrorTracking' );
    } ] );

More details can be found in the blog article referenced above, I haven't posted everything found there here as it's probably not all relevant.

2
votes

In my case, for an Azure hosted Angular 2/4 site, my API call to mySite/api/... was redirecting due to mySite routing issues. So, it was returning the HTML from the redirected page instead of the api JSON. I added an exclusion in a web.config file for the api path.

I was not getting this error when developing locally because the Site and API were on different ports. There is probably a better way to do this ... but it worked.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <rewrite>
        <rules>
        <clear />

        <!-- ignore static files -->
        <rule name="AngularJS Conditions" stopProcessing="true">
        <match url="(app/.*|css/.*|fonts/.*|assets/.*|images/.*|js/.*|api/.*)" />
        <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false" />
        <action type="None" />
        </rule>

        <!--remaining all other url's point to index.html file -->
        <rule name="AngularJS Wildcard" enabled="true">
        <match url="(.*)" />
        <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false" />
        <action type="Rewrite" url="index.html" />
        </rule>

        </rules>
        </rewrite>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>
2
votes

This might be old. But, it just occurred in angular, the content type for request and response were different in my code. So, check headers for ,

 let headers = new Headers({
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        **Accept**: 'application/json'
    });

in React axios

axios({
  method:'get',
  url:'http://  ',
 headers: {
         'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        Accept: 'application/json'
    },
  responseType:'json'
})

jQuery Ajax:

 $.ajax({
      url: this.props.url,
      dataType: 'json',
**headers: { 
          'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        Accept: 'application/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)
    });
  },
2
votes

Make sure that response is in JSON format otherwise fires this error.

2
votes

Those who are using create-react-app and trying to fetch local json files.

As in create-react-app, webpack-dev-server is used to handle the request and for every request it serves the index.html. So you are getting

SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0.

To solve this, you need to eject the app and modify the webpack-dev-server configuration file.

You can follow the steps from here.

2
votes

SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0


You are getting an html file instead of json.

Html files begin with <!DOCTYPE html>.

I "achieved" this error by forgetting the https:// in my fetch method:

fetch(`/api.github.com/users/${login}`)
    .then(response => response.json())
    .then(setData);

I verified my hunch:

I logged the response as text instead of JSON.

fetch(`/api.github.com/users/${login}`)
    .then(response => response.text())
    .then(text => console.log(text))
    .then(setData);

Yep, an html file.

Solution:

I fixed the error by adding back the https:// in my fetch method.

fetch(`https://api.github.com/users/${login}`)
    .then(response => response.json())
    .then(setData)
    .catch(error => (console.log(error)));
1
votes

I had the same error message following a tutorial. Our issue seems to be 'url: this.props.url' in the ajax call. In React.DOM when you are creating your element, mine looks like this.

ReactDOM.render(
    <CommentBox data="/api/comments" pollInterval={2000}/>,
    document.getElementById('content')
);

Well, this CommentBox does not have a url in its props, just data. When I switched url: this.props.url -> url: this.props.data, it made the right call to the server and I got back the expected data.

I hope it helps.

1
votes

In a nutshell, if you're getting this error or similar error, that means only one thing. That is, in someplace in our codebase we were expecting a valid JSON format to process and we didn't get one. For example:

var string = "some string";
JSON.parse(string)

Will throw an error, saying

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token s in JSON at position 0

Because, the first character in string is s & it's not a valid JSON now. This can throw error in between also. like:

var invalidJSON= '{"foo" : "bar", "missedquotehere : "value" }';
JSON.parse(invalidJSON)

Will throw error:

VM598:1 Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token v in JSON at position 36

because we intentionally missed a quote in the JSON string invalidJSON at position 36.

And if you fix that:

var validJSON= '{"foo" : "bar", "missedquotehere : "value" }';
JSON.parse(validJSON)

will give you an object in JSON.

Now, this error can be thrown in any place & in any framework/library. Most of the time you may be reading a network response which is not valid JSON. So steps of debugging this issue can be like:

  1. curl or hit the actual API you're calling.
  2. Log/Copy the response and try to parse it with JSON.parse. If you're getting error, fix it.
  3. If not, make sure your code is not mutating/changing the original response.
0
votes

After spending a lot of time with this, I found out that in my case the problem was having "homepage" defined on my package.json file made my app not work on firebase (same 'token' error). I created my react app using create-react-app, then I used the firebase guide on the READ.me file to deploy to github pages, realized I had to do extra work for the router to work, and switched to firebase. github guide had added the homepage key on package.json and caused the deploy issue.

0
votes

Protip: Testing json on a local Node.js server? Make sure you don't already have something routing to that path

'/:url(app|assets|stuff|etc)';
0
votes

For me, this happened when one of the properties on the object I was returning as JSON threw an exception.

public Dictionary<string, int> Clients { get; set; }
public int CRCount
{
    get
    {
        var count = 0;
        //throws when Clients is null
        foreach (var c in Clients) {
            count += c.Value;
        }
        return count;
    }
}

Adding a null check, fixed it for me:

public Dictionary<string, int> Clients { get; set; }
public int CRCount
{
    get
    {
        var count = 0;
        if (Clients != null) {
            foreach (var c in Clients) {
                count += c.Value;
            }
        }
        return count;
    }
}
0
votes

just something basic to check, make sure you dont have anything commented out in the json file

//comments here will not be parsed and throw error
0
votes

In python you can use json.Dump(str) before send result to html template. with this command string convert to correct json format and send to html template. After send this result to JSON.parse(result) , this is correct response and you can use this.

0
votes

For some, this may help you guys: I had a similar experience with Wordpress REST API. I even used Postman to check if I had the correct routes or endpoint. I later found out that I accidentally put an "echo" inside my script - hooks:

Debug & check your console

Cause of the error

So basically, this means that I printed a value that isn't JSON that is mixed with the script that causes AJAX error - "SyntaxError: Unexpected token r in JSON at position 0"

0
votes

In my case (backend), I was using res.send(token);

Everything got fixed when I changed to res.send(data);

You may want to check this if everything is working and posting as intended, but the error keeps popping up in your front-end.

0
votes

The possibilities for this error are overwhelming.

In my case, I found that the issue was adding the homepage filed in package.json caused the issue.

Worth checking: in package.json change:

homepage: "www.example.com"

to

hompage: ""   
0
votes

In my Case there was problem with "Bearer" in header ideally it should be "Bearer "(space after the end character) but in my case it was "Bearer" there was no space after the character. Hope it helps some one!

0
votes

Malformed JSON or HTML instead of JSON is the underlying cause of this issue, as described by the other answers, however in my case I couldn't reliably replicate this error, as if the server was sometimes returning valid JSON, and other times returning something else like an HTML error page or similar.

In order to avoid it breaking the page altogether, I resorted to manually trying to parse the returned content, and share it in case it helps anyone else resolve it for them.

const url = "https://my.server.com/getData";

fetch(url).then(response => {
  if (!response.ok) return; // call failed

  response.text().then(shouldBeJson => { // get the text-only of the response
    let json = null;
    try {
      json = JSON.parse(shouldBeJson); // try to parse that text
    } catch (e) {
      console.warn(e); // json parsing failed
      return;
    };
    if (!json) return; // extra check just to make sure we have something now.

    // do something with my json object
  });
});

While this obviously doesn't resolve the root cause of the issue, it can still help to handle the issue a bit more gracefully and take some kind of reasonable action in instances when it fails.

0
votes

If you receive this error on a Chrome Extension, it can be tough to track down, especially if it occurs on the moment you install the extension. However, I have found a way that makes it easier. In my case, I had a Chrome Extension that called some scripts from my web server on install of the plugin, pulling down some default settings. I was receiving the error:

SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0 in _generated_background_page.html

When you get this, go into Extensions, find your extension, click "background page" hyperlink, and the inspector opens for it. Then, go to Network and click CTRL+R. Now, you'll see all the things that the background page had to load. Click on each one, and especially ones that connect back to a remote server. Then, you'll see in the Network tab a Headers, followed by a Preview. Look at that Preview on each of the items. If you see something other than what the header was for expecting this data, or you see errors, then that's likely your cause. In my case, my server script was calling another script and that script had a bug in it (missing variables at runtime), which then made my application/json header not match with the data it was sending, and thus the unexpected token error.

0
votes

In my case was that when trying sending the data in test api node the json object was having an extra comma at the end like

POST   http://localhost:9000/api/posts/ 
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "title": "sokka",
    "description": "hope this works",
    "username": "sokka blog4",
}

henceforth i only needed to remove the last extra comma and send this kind of data

POST   http://localhost:9000/api/posts/ 
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "title": "sokka",
    "description": "hope this works",
    "username": "sokka blog4"
}

i was using RESTclient extension to test my api.