NODE.js fs.readFile and the BOM marker

Working on a ReactJS project, got a small glitch while trying to read a JSON file and parse it as a javascript object. 
 
  getDataObject() {
        var dataString = fs.readFileSync("./json/data.json", "utf8");
        return JSON.parse(dataString);
    }
output:
  SyntaxError: Unexpected token  

After checking, double and triple checking again that the file was correct I went deeper and realized that "fs.readFileSync" was returning me the BOM for the UTF file at the beginning of the string. So we just need to strip it out.
   
   getDataObject() {
        var dataString = fs.readFileSync("./json/data.json", "utf8");
        return JSON.parse(dataString.replace(/^\uFEFF/, ""));
    }
I then checked and there are "packages" for this, however I don't think is proper to just import a new dependency just to fix something this small.

The big issue here is why is this considered correct. The BOM is not part of the string, it's a marker used (and also optional) to aid in how to read the content, but it is not part of the content.

Comments

Rikardo said…
Excellent, it works. Thank you
10/27/19, 2:07 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Get-ChildItem vs Dir in PowerShell

Image
Batch as usual Recently I was in the need of modifying a huge amount of files across a network share. After installing Serviio media streaming service I noticed that it will crash "randomly". After checking the logs it was clear that ffmpeg was crashing when trying to open subtitle files that were not in the encoding indicated by the Serviio console. I needed a quick way to update all subtitle files to a common encoding, so I decided to convert all files to UTF8. Since I use a windows environment I went directly to PowerShell and wrote this.  Get-ChildItem -path .\ -filter *.srt -file  | ForEach-Object { (get-content $_.FullName) | Out-File $_.FullName -encoding utf8 } This worked almost right except for files with "[" or "]" (among other symbols) on the name or path. To solve it, just added the "-LiteralPath" switch to tell powershell not to consider any wildcards on the path name and just use it exactly as it is.  Get-ChildIt
Read more

The distributed monolith antipattern

Image
The words distributed and monolith are usually adversaries in software architecture, contrary to the monolith model,  a distributed approach will allow you to have isolated services as building blocks of functionality for your system. Let's assume you reached that architecture already, either from scratch or by decomposing an existing monolith. At this point you have a set of services.  Some people go and just say - "it's microservices!". Well..., that's not enough yet, but now you have all the pieces into individual services and the whole system working together.  This is a step into the right direction for scalability, but we can do more in other areas.  So, let's check: how do you deploy them ? If you deploy all services at once , you still have a lot to improve, for now you have a "distributed monolith" (Open to a better name for this), which I consider to be an antipattern, and this is more of a common practice than expected,
Read more