Jackson error "Illegal character... only regular white space allowed" when parsing JSON

Question

I am trying to retrieve JSON data from a URL but get the following error:

Illegal character ((CTRL-CHAR, code 31)):
only regular white space (\r, \n,\t) is allowed between tokens

My code:

final URI uri = new URIBuilder(UrlConstants.SEARCH_URL)
      .addParameter("keywords", searchTerm)
      .addParameter("count", "50")
      .build();
  node = new ObjectMapper().readTree(new URL(uri.toString())); <<<<< THROWS THE ERROR

The url constructed is i.e https://www.example.org/api/search.json?keywords=iphone&count=50

What is going wrong here? And how can I parse this data successfully?

---

Imports:

import com.google.appengine.repackaged.org.codehaus.jackson.JsonNode;
import com.google.appengine.repackaged.org.codehaus.jackson.map.ObjectMapper;
import com.google.appengine.repackaged.org.codehaus.jackson.node.ArrayNode;
import org.apache.http.client.utils.URIBuilder;

example response

{
    meta: {
        indexAllowed: false
    },
    products: {
        products: [ 
            {
                id: 1,
                name: "Apple iPhone 6 16GB 4G LTE GSM Factory Unlocked"
            },
            {
                id: 2,
                name: "Apple iPhone 7 8GB 4G LTE GSM Factory Unlocked"
            }
        ]
    }
}

Answer 1

I got this same issue, and I found that it was caused by the Content-Encoding: gzip header. The client application (where the exception was being thrown) was not able to handle this content-encoding. FWIW the client application was using io.github.openfeign:feign-core:9.5.0, and this library appears to have some issues around compression (link).

You might try adding the header Accept-Encoding: identity to your request, however, not all web servers/web applications are configured properly, and some seem to disregard this header. See this question for more details about how to prevent gzipped content.