"Unexpected end of JSON input" Angular 5

Question

When sending a GET request to API, I'm always getting an error (so the response will fall into the CATCH instead of TRY) even tough status is 200.

Here is the request :

// Check if user exists at blur on email input authentication
checkUserExists( platformId: string, email: string) {
    return this.http.get(checkUserExistsAPI + `/${platformId}/${email}`);
}

As i'm using Angular 5, I took off the .map(res).

And here is the function that uses the request :

// Verify if emails exists
verifyEmail(email) {
    if (email) {
        this.authenticationService.checkUserExists( this.platformId, email )
            .subscribe(
                (data: CheckEmailResponse) => {
                    console.log(data);
                },
                (error: CheckEmailResponse) => {
                    console.log(error);

                }
            );
    }
}

It will never console.log(data) as I'm always getting this error :

error:{
    error: SyntaxError: Unexpected end of JSON input at JSON.parse (<anonymous>) at XMLHttpRequest.onLo…, text: ""}
    headers: HttpHeaders {normalizedNames: Map(0), lazyUpdate: null, headers: Map(0)}
    message:"Http failure during parsing for http://API.com"
name:"HttpErrorResponse"
ok:false
status:200
statusText:"OK"

Answer 1

Ok so I figured it out. The response didn't had any content body and Angular 5 is, by default, expecting a Json formatted content body, therefor it couldn't work. I only needed the status response anyway to know if it was 200 or 404.

I added { responseType: 'text' } to the request as above`:

return this.http.get(checkUserExistsAPI +/${platformId}/${email}, { responseType: 'text' });

So now it managed to go to the TRY of my TRY/CATCH with a data equals to "null". But I don't care about the data as I only care about the status. Anyway, now if the status is 200, it will go into the TRY, if the status is 404, it will go into the CATCH.