javascriptjsonparsing

how to distinguish between an actual line break and a \n character

I am trying to write a parser for JSON string, but stuck in one test case.

["line   // <--- unexpected end of string
break"]

my json file should give this error, similar to vs code, but when my script is trying to parse this, I get a valid JSON object

[ 'line\nbreak' ]

I am reading the file using fs.readFileSync(path).toString('utf-8') which represents line breaks as \n. Is there any other way to know if the string contains a \n character or an actual line break? How can I distinguish between them and throw an error here?

Solution 
  • ["line
break"]

    is not valid JSON:

    JSON.parse('["line\nbreak"]');

    Line breaks in strings must be escaped in JSON so that the JSON string contains \ and n as separate characters:

    console.log(JSON.stringify(['line\nbreak']).split("").join(" "));