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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T01:05:05+00:00

What the best way to report a syntax error when I’m loading a JSON

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What the best way to report a syntax error when I’m loading a JSON feed with jQuery? I can establish the error reporting settings like this:

error: function(xhr){
    alert('Request Status: ' + xhr.status + ' Status Text: ' + xhr.statusText + ' ' + xhr.responseText);
}

however this function doesn’t fire when the URL I’ve called loads a valid page (albeit not one with a JSON object in it). Futhermore, I can’t check the data that it does return because (according to Firebug at least) jQuery.getJSON breaks at the syntax error before it passes the object to the function that executes it.

The reason I’d like to report errors is because this is my way of checking whether the user has supplied a URL that will produce a valid JSON feed.

Here’s a related answer that requires control over what the server will respond with.
Here’s the syntax error that Firebug gives me
The syntax error Firebug gives me http://img.skitch.com/20090623-8c97g47jha4mn6adqqtjd41cwy.jpg

Any ideas? Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Thanks to all who answered. Because I was calling a JSON feed from an external domain, I wasn’t able to just use jQuery’s AJAX functionality and pull the feed as “text” instead of “json”. jQuery only allows you to pull “json” and “script” from a remote source.

    What I ended up doing instead was writing a PHP script to make the external call that lived on my own server. I use jQuery AJAX to call this, pass the requested source in the URL, and then grab that as “text.” I then run my own check to ensure that it’s properly formatted JSON, and then parse it with another library. jQuery doesn’t have the ability to parse JSON at the moment; $.getJSON only works if you pass a URL to it.

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