npm install cannot read package.json

Question

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

Answer 1

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.