Question

I am trying to access the StackExchange API from Emacs’ elisp:

(require 'url)
(require 'json)

(defvar url-http-end-of-headers)

(defun read-json ()
  (interactive)
  (with-current-buffer (url-retrieve-synchronously "http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.8/users/2386")
  (goto-char url-http-end-of-headers)
  (json-read)))

M-x read-json results in the following error: JSON readtable error.

Am I missing anything?

Answer 1

This is almost certainly related to gzip encoding, the raw server response is as follows:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:41:20 GMT
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: private
Content-Encoding: gzip
X-AspNetMvc-Version: 2.0
X-RateLimit-Max: 300
X-RateLimit-Current: 290
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Content-Length: 676

{compressed  body}

The client does not appear to be explicitly volunteering that it supports gzip (note the absence of the Accept-Encoding header), but the server is compressing the response anyways. Here are the request headers from my client when running your code:

GET /0.8/users/2386 HTTP/1.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
Connection: keep-alive
Extension: Security/Digest Security/SSL
Host: api.stackoverflow.com
Accept-charset: iso-8859-1;q=1, gb2312;q=0.5, utf-8;q=0.5, big5;q=0.5, iso-2022-jp;q=0.5, shift_jis;q=0.5, euc-tw;q=0.5, euc-jp;q=0.5, euc-jis-2004;q=0.5, euc-kr;q=0.5, us-ascii;q=0.5, utf-7;q=0.5, hz-gb-2312;q=0.5, big5-hkscs;q=0.5, gbk;q=0.5, gb18030;q=0.5, iso-8859-5;q=0.5, koi8-r;q=0.5, koi8-u;q=0.5, cp866;q=0.5, koi8-t;q=0.5, windows-1251;q=0.5, cp855;q=0.5, iso-8859-2;q=0.5, iso-8859-3;q=0.5, iso-8859-4;q=0.5, iso-8859-9;q=0.5, iso-8859-10;q=0.5, iso-8859-13;q=0.5, iso-8859-14;q=0.5, iso-8859-15;q=0.5, windows-1250;q=0.5, windows-1252;q=0.5, windows-1254;q=0.5, windows-1257;q=0.5, cp850;q=0.5, cp852;q=0.5, cp857;q=0.5, cp858;q=0.5, cp860;q=0.5, cp861;q=0.5, cp863;q=0.5, cp865;q=0.5, cp437;q=0.5, next;q=0.5, hp-roman8;q=0.5, adobe-standard-encoding;q=0.5, iso-8859-16;q=0.5, iso-8859-7;q=0.5, windows-1253;q=0.5, cp737;q=0.5, cp851;q=0.5, cp869;q=0.5, iso-8859-8;q=0.5, windows-1255;q=0.5, cp862;q=0.5, iso-2022-jp-2004;q=0.5, cp874;q=0.5, iso-8859-11;q=0.5, viscii;q=0.5, windows-1258;q=0.5, iso-8859-6;q=0.5, windows-1256;q=0.5, iso-2022-cn;q=0.5, iso-2022-cn-ext;q=0.5, iso-2022-jp-2;q=0.5, iso-2022-kr;q=0.5, utf-16le;q=0.5, utf-16be;q=0.5, utf-16;q=0.5, x-ctext;q=0.5
Accept: */*
User-Agent: URL/Emacs (i386-mingw-nt6.1.7600; Windows-NT; 32bit)

The server behavior is acceptable according to the HTTP spec:

If no Accept-Encoding field is present in a request, the server
MAY assume that the client will accept any content coding. In
this case, if “identity” is one of the available
content-codings, then the server SHOULD use the “identity”
content-coding, unless it has additional information that a
different content-coding is meaningful to the client.

If you explicitly set the header value, the response is returned as expected:

(setq url-mime-encoding-string "identity")