npm install cannot read package.json
npm, package-managers
Solution
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 the difference 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.
Problem
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 <the.dude@dudethinking.com>", "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?