Javascript SSH Buffer to JSON

Question

I have a json file in a sFTP server that I go grab using the ssh2-sftp-client library. I do NOT want to write this file to a local file, I want to be able to read it and save it into a JSON variable in code. But I cannot seem to convert the buffer output to JSON. Here's my code:

const Client = require('ssh2-sftp-client');

async function getFTPFile() {
  const sftp = new Client();
  const config = {
    host: ...,
    username: ...,
    password: ...
  };

  return sftp.connect(config)
    .then(() => sftp.get('./directory/Data.json'))
    .then((data) => {
      console.log(data);
      return JSON.parse(data.toString());
    });
}

I confirmed it's pulling the right file but when I try to convert the buffer array to a json object I get the following error:

SyntaxError: Unexpected token � in JSON at position 0
    at JSON.parse (<anonymous>)

How do I resolve this error?

Answer 1

Turns out the file was encoded with utf16 and it started with a ZWNBSP character. So the following resolved the issue:

  let file = data.toString('utf16le');
  if (file.charCodeAt(0) === 0xFEFF) {
    file = file.slice(1)
  }
  return JSON.parse(file);