Node.js unexpected token R - node.js

Question

I am getting this error from my terminal:
SyntaxError: Unexpected token R
at Object.parse (native)
at Client.exports.json [as parse] (/Users/terrychen/Desktop/Git/ControlPanel/node_modules/hippie/lib/hippie/parsers.js:15:18)
at Request._callback (/Users/terrychen/Desktop/Git/ControlPanel/node_modules/hippie/lib/hippie/client.js:388:10)
at Request.self.callback (/Users/terrychen/Desktop/Git/ControlPanel/node_modules/hippie/node_modules/request/request.js:129:22)
at Request.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:98:17)
at Request.<anonymous> (/Users/terrychen/Desktop/Git/ControlPanel/node_modules/hippie/node_modules/request/request.js:873:14)
at Request.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:117:20)
at IncomingMessage.<anonymous> (/Users/terrychen/Desktop/Git/ControlPanel/node_modules/hippie/node_modules/request/request.js:824:12)
at IncomingMessage.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:117:20)
at _stream_readable.js:920:16
While I am just executing a simple script with hippie API testing module:
var hippie = require('hippie');
hippie()
.json().get('https://api.github.com/users/vesln')
.expectStatus(200)
.end(function(err, res, body) {
if (err) throw err;
});
Any idea why this is happening? Appreciate your answers!

Answer 1

The issue here is that at some point hippie expects the API to be returning JSON to be parsed. And you probably manually checked that URL and saw it was JSON. But this type of error is an indication of bad input into JSON.parse. Commonly you'll see unexpected token u when undefined is passed in.
First step in debugging I took was putting console.log(arguments) before if(err.. while actually only interested in the contents of the res object, it reveals GitHub actually returned an error here.
{
...,
body: 'Request forbidden by administrative rules. Please make sure your request has a User-Agent header (http://developer.github.com/v3/#user-agent-required). Check https://developer.github.com for other possible causes.' }
}
And this is the R of unexpected token, this is not valid JSON. And as the message states, the missing User-Agent header is the likeliest cause.
This code works.
var hippie = require('hippie');
hippie()
.header("user-agent", "derpbot")
.json().get('https://api.github.com/users/vesln')
.expectStatus(200)
.end(function(err, res, body) {
if (err) throw err;
});