Installation failed. The package.json is not valid (error was: SyntaxError: Unexpected token ).

[OKNoah]

Got this error when installing from github's .zip by pasting in package manager GUI.

[scriptin]

Which version of brackets? Worked for me on 0.43.0

I think it's either a bug in parser, or I'm missing something about package.json format. I followed instructions pretty rigorously, and the error is kinda strange - "Unexpected token ". This is exactly why I couldn't add it to extension registry.

I'll take a closer look.

[OKNoah]

Thanks.

Version info:

Release 1.1 build 1.1.0-15558 (release ea908cae5)
build timestamp: Wed Dec 17 2014 12:50:55 GMT-0800

[peterflynn]

It looks like the problem is that the package.json file contains a byte order marker (BOM). I seems the ZIP decompressor that Brackets uses may do something funny with it (converting it to 0xFEFF, a UTF-16 BOM which gets interpreted as a zero-width non-breaking space character -- hence the blank space in the error message), and in turn JSON.parse() chokes on that bad char.

Sounds exactly like this problem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7297888/ufeff-character-showing-up-in-files-how-to-remove-them

Since a BOM is unnecessary and not recommended for UTF-8 files anyway, the best solution is to edit your package.json file to remove it. The Stackoverflow link above gives a bunch of tips on how to do that. I'll make sure Brackets is tracking the unzip bug on our end as a general issue.

[scriptin]

@peterflynn Thanks, that helped!