Ошибка unexpected character encountered while parsing value path line 0 position 0

Currently, I have some issues. I’m using C# with Json.NET. The issue is that I always get:

{«Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: e. Path », line 0, position 0.»}

So the way I’m using Json.NET is the following. I have a Class which should be saved. The class looks like this:

public class stats
{
    public string time { get; set; }
    public string value { get; set; }
}

public class ViewerStatsFormat
{
    public List<stats> viewerstats { get; set; }
    public String version { get; set; }

    public ViewerStatsFormat(bool chk)
    {
        this.viewerstats = new List<stats>();
    }
}

One object of this class will be filled and saved with:

 File.WriteAllText(tmpfile, JsonConvert.SerializeObject(current), Encoding.UTF8);

The saving part works fine and the file exists and is filled. After that the file will be read back into the class with:

try 
{ 
    ViewerStatsFormat current = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<ViewerStatsFormat>(tmpfile);
    //otherstuff        
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
    //error loging stuff
}

Now on the current= line comes the exception:

{«Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: e. Path », line 0, position 0.»}

I don’t know why this comes. The JSON file is the following -> Click me I am the JSON link

Does anyone have any ideas?

This issue is related to Byte Order Mark in the JSON file. JSON file is not encoded as UTF8 encoding data when saved. Using File.ReadAllText(pathFile) fix this issue.

When we are operating on Byte data and converting that to string and then passing to JsonConvert.DeserializeObject, we can use UTF32 encoding to get the string.

byte[] docBytes = File.ReadAllBytes(filePath);

string jsonString = Encoding.UTF32.GetString(docBytes);

I ran into this issue and it ended up being because of BOM characters in my input string.

Here’s what I ended up doing:

String.Trim(new char[] { 'uFEFF', 'u200B' });

This resolved the issue for me.

answered Oct 26, 2021 at 15:21

In my case, I was getting an error on JsonConvert.PopulateObject().
My request was returning JSON that was wrapped in an extra pair of ‘[ ]’ brackets, making my result an array of one object rather than just an object. Here’s what I did to get inside these brackets (only for that type of model):

           T jsonResponse = new T();
           var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings
           {
               DateParseHandling = DateParseHandling.DateTimeOffset,
               NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore,
           };
           var jRslt = response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;
           if (jsonResponse.GetType() == typeof(myProject.Models.MyModel))
           {
               var dobj = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<MyModel[]>(jRslt);
               var y = dobj.First();
               var szObj = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(y);
               JsonConvert.PopulateObject(szObj, jsonResponse, settings);
           }
           else
           {
               JsonConvert.PopulateObject(jRslt, jsonResponse);
           }

answered Nov 12, 2019 at 16:04

If you are using downloading data using url…may need to use

var result = client.DownloadData(url);

In my scenario I had a slightly different message, where the line and position were not zero.

E. Path ‘job[0].name’, line 1, position 12.

This was the top Google answer for the message I quoted.

This came about because I had called a program from the Windows command line, passing JSON as a parameter.

When I reviewed the args in my program, all the double quotes got stripped.
You have to reconstitute them.

I posted a solution here. Though it could probably be enhanced with a Regex.

answered May 2, 2019 at 11:31

I had a similar error and thought I’d answer in case anyone was having something similar. I was looping over a directory of json files and deserializing them but was getting this same error.

The problem was that it was trying to grab hidden files as well. Make sure the file you’re passing in is a .json file. I’m guessing it’ll handle text as well. Hope this helps.

answered Jul 22, 2019 at 16:06

I had simular problem. In my case the problem was in DateTime format. It was just numbers and it is also know as EpochFormat or UnixTimestamp.
A part from my JSON:

"direction": "outbound",
"date_archive": 1554691800224,
"date_doc": 1524700800000,
"date_sent": 1524704189000,
"date_received": 1524704189000,
"date_store_till": 1712544600224,

So I’ve used an attribute like this:

[JsonProperty("date_received")]
[JsonConverter(typeof(MicrosecondEpochConverter))]
public DateTime? DateReceived { get; set; }

You can find MicrosecondEpochConverter code here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/19972214/4324624

answered Apr 6, 2022 at 20:26

answered Feb 1, 2019 at 2:56

answered Jan 14, 2022 at 23:17

answered Mar 1, 2022 at 0:53

When I encountered a similar problem, I fixed it by substituting &mode=xml for &mode=json in the request.