Issue sending over JSON as string from POSTMAN to node server

Question

I have some json that looks like this:

const json = {
   "name": "Peter",
   "age": 21
}

Then I call JSON.stringify(json) which gives me the following:

'{"name":"Peter","age":21}'

I want to send data from the UI to my server. Currently I am using POSTMAN for this.

POST
http:localhost:8888/user
Body -> JSON

{
  "user": { 
     "details": '{"name":"Peter","age":21}',
     "foo": "bar"
   }
}

details here needs to be a string but when I send over the data I get the following error on the server

SyntaxError: Unexpected token } in JSON at position 114

Does anyone have any ideas here?

Jacob · Accepted Answer · 2022-06-16 12:19:09Z

1

JSON does not allow for single quotes, what you are trying to send is invalid. What you need to do is use double quotes and escape the internal quotes for the JSON key/values:

{
  "user": { 
     "details": "{\"name\":\"Peter\",\"age\":21}",
     "foo": "bar"
   }
}

answered Jun 16, 2022 at 12:19

Jacob

1,84011 silver badges17 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

5 Comments

peter flanagan Over a year ago

thanks Jacob. In reality the details is far bigger. is there any regex trick to do this for me?

peter flanagan Over a year ago

if I use the following s.replace(/\"/g, '\\"') I get two escapes and it still doesn't work

Jacob Over a year ago

I fear you are misunderstanding how escaped characters work, can you please show your full relevant code? Telling me you do a stringify in the original post and then a regex replace in a comment is a bit disorganized and confusing

peter flanagan Over a year ago

well the relevant code is the same thing but instead of name and age there are 100s of key/values so i can't really go and manually add the ``. Make sense? I found this tool which helps, but would rather handle this in my own code

Jacob Over a year ago

I can almost assure you the problem isnt the code, if you sent the object from the frontend directly to the backend, it would likely work fine. The problem is it sounds like you are building an object in the frontend, logging it out (hence losing the escapes) and then copying that string into Postman. Thats why I said I don't think you are understanding escaped characters. Is there a reason you are using Postman and not having the frontend directly call your backend?

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Issue sending over JSON as string from POSTMAN to node server

1 Answer 1

5 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

5 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related