HTTPClient POST tries to parse a non-JSON response

Question

I'm trying to make a request in Angular and I know that the HTTP response will not be in JSON but in text. However, Angular seems to be expecting a JSON response since the error is the following:

SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0 at JSON.parse () at XMLHttpRequest.c

As well as

Http failure during parsing for http://localhost:9...

This is the post method:

return this.http.post(this.loginUrl, this.createLoginFormData(username, password), this.httpOptions)
  .pipe(
    tap( // Log the result or error
      data => console.log(data);
      error => console.log(error)
    )
  );

and the headers.

private httpOptions = {

  headers: new HttpHeaders({
    'Accept': 'text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */*',
    'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    responseType: 'text'
  },

) };

I thought that responseType: 'text' would be enough to make Angular expect a non JSON response.

Answer 1

You've put responseType: 'text' in the wrong section of your httpOptions - It should sit outside of headers, like so:

private httpOptions = {
  headers: new HttpHeaders({
    'Accept': 'text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */*',
    'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
  }),
  responseType: 'text'
};

With what you had before, a request header of responseType was being sent to the server, rather than simply having an instruction to Angular to actually treat the response as text.

Answer 2

This code finally worked for me to xhr download a pdf file (Angular 6 / Laravel 5.6). The specialty for downloading a PDF file vs a text file was 'responseType': 'blob' as 'json'

showPdf(filename: String){
  this.restService.downloadFile(
     'protected/getpdf',
     {'filename': filename}
  )
}

//method from restService
public downloadFile(endpoint:String, postData:Object){

  var restService = this

  var HTTPOptions = {
     headers: new HttpHeaders({
        'Accept':'application/pdf'
     }),
     'responseType': 'blob' as 'json'
  }

  this.http.post(this.baseurl+endpoint,postData,HTTPOptions )
  .subscribe(
     res => {
        console.log(res) //do something with the blob
     },
     error => {
        console.error('download error:', error)
     }, 
     () => {
        console.log('Completed file download.')
     }
  )
}

I found the Solution through Kirk Larkins Answer (thank you a lot!) and a long angular github issue thread https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/18586#issuecomment-323216764

Answer 3

If you just want to receive a plain text. You can set Http option without a header.

this.http.get("http://localhost:3000/login",{responseType: 'text'})
.subscribe((result)=>console.log(result))

Answer 4

By default, Angular sets the response type to JSON.

To override it, you can use headers and set the responseType to 'text' or a simple method would be like this

this.http.get(url, {responseType: 'text'})