JSON.parse() throws “unexpected token” error for valid JSON

Although your JSON string is valid JSON.parse is likely to throw error. This is because JSON.parse cannot parse some special characters that are \n, \t, \r and \f.

You need to escape these special characters for before passing JSON string to JSON.parse function.

Here is a function that takes a JSON string and escapes the special characters:

        function escapeSpecialChars(jsonString) {

            return jsonString.replace(/\n/g, "\\n")
                .replace(/\r/g, "\\r")
                .replace(/\t/g, "\\t")
                .replace(/\f/g, "\\f");

        }
Narayan Prusty
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Comments: 3
  1. Tyler Collier
    1 year ago

    Don’t forget about \", as mentioned on this stackoverflow answer.

    ReplyCancel
  2. Gajapathi
    1 year ago

    Thanks for this lovely post

    ReplyCancel
  3. Gajapathi
    1 year ago

    Very Helpful, after wasting my 2 hrs of time, i found this, and ended my serach for JSON.parse error

    ReplyCancel

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Narayan Prusty

Narayan is a web astronaut. He is the founder of QScutter and QNimate. Narayan is an expert in Web Development, Intel XDK, WordPress and Web Security. He is the main author of QNimate.

1 year ago 3 Comments Web Development
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