SyntaxError: Expected double-quoted property name in JSON

[jojorne]

Type: Bug

Open a brand new Visual Studio Code:

[info] update#setState idle
[error] SyntaxError: Expected double-quoted property name in JSON at position 158 (line 20 column 1)
    at JSON.parse (<anonymous>)
    at bt.Y (C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code\resources\app\out\vs\code\electron-main\main.js:110:71146)
[warning] updateWindowsJumpList#setJumpList unexpected result: customCategoryAccessDeniedError

VS Code version: Code 1.90.0 (89de5a8, 2024-06-04T19:33:54.889Z)
OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631
Modes:

[aeschli]

Can you check if your argv.json file has a syntax error? It's in your home folder at .vscode\

The failing parse statement is here:

vscode/src/vs/code/electron-main/app.ts

Line 1440 in 94c4337

const argvJSON = JSON.parse(stripComments(argvString));

@bpasero Would be good to have better error reporting for malformed arg.json files.

[bpasero]

/duplicate #212671

[vscodenpa]

Thanks for creating this issue! We figured it's covering the same as another one we already have. Thus, we closed this one as a duplicate. You can search for similar existing issues. See also our issue reporting guidelines.

Happy Coding!

[bpasero]

@aeschli is there a way to safely parse a JSON with comments and syntax errors?

[jojorne]

This is my ~\.vscode\argv.json.

// This configuration file allows you to pass permanent command line arguments to VS Code.
// Only a subset of arguments is currently supported to reduce the likelihood of breaking
// the installation.
//
// PLEASE DO NOT CHANGE WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT
//
// NOTE: Changing this file requires a restart of VS Code.
{
	// Use software rendering instead of hardware accelerated rendering.
	// This can help in cases where you see rendering issues in VS Code.
	"disable-hardware-acceleration": true,

	// Allows to disable crash reporting.
	// Should restart the app if the value is changed.
	"enable-crash-reporter": false,

	// Unique id used for correlating crash reports sent from this instance.
	// Do not edit this value.
	"crash-reporter-id": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
}

I can only think about the last ,.

...And, yes! After removing the trailing ,:

[info] update#setState idle
[warning] updateWindowsJumpList#setJumpList unexpected result: customCategoryAccessDeniedError

[aeschli]

@bpasero Our own JSON parser is fault tolerant and can also handle comments and extra semicolons.

I've seen that we have multiple places in the code base where we read and parse argv.json. Would be good to share that code.