What causes "Malformed JSON from OpenReview for ${label}: ${e?.message ?? e}" in jackwener/OpenCLI?

Retry the request; this is usually transient.

jackwener/OpenCLI · error · CommandExecutionError

Malformed JSON from OpenReview for ${label}: ${e?.message ??

Error message

Malformed JSON from OpenReview for ${label}: ${e?.message ?? e}

What it means

openreviewFetch throws CommandExecutionError when the HTTP response body cannot be parsed as JSON (resp.json() rejects). This indicates the API returned truncated, empty, or HTML (e.g. a gateway error page) content instead of JSON. The underlying parse error message is embedded for diagnosis.

Source

Thrown at clis/openreview/utils.js:95

        resp = await fetch(url);
    }
    catch (e) {
        throw new CommandExecutionError(`Network failure fetching ${label}: ${e?.message ?? e}`, 'Check your network connection and try again.');
    }
    if (resp.status === 404) {
        return null;
    }
    if (!resp.ok) {
        let body = '';
        try { body = (await resp.text()).slice(0, 200); } catch {}
        throw new CommandExecutionError(`OpenReview API HTTP ${resp.status} for ${label}${body ? ` (${body})` : ''}`, 'The OpenReview API may be down or rate-limiting.');
    }
    let json;
    try {
        json = await resp.json();
    }
    catch (e) {
        throw new CommandExecutionError(`Malformed JSON from OpenReview for ${label}: ${e?.message ?? e}`, 'Try again or report this as an OpenReview API bug.');
    }
    const envelopeErrors = Array.isArray(json?.errors) ? json.errors.filter(Boolean) : [];
    const envelopeError = typeof json?.error === 'string' ? json.error.trim() : '';
    if (envelopeErrors.length || envelopeError) {
        const detail = envelopeError || envelopeErrors.map((entry) => {
            if (typeof entry === 'string') return entry;
            if (entry?.message) return String(entry.message);
            return JSON.stringify(entry);
        }).join('; ');
        throw new CommandExecutionError(`OpenReview API error for ${label}: ${detail}`, 'The OpenReview API returned an application-level error.');
    }
    return json;
}

/** Format ms-since-epoch as YYYY-MM-DD; empty string for invalid input. */
export function formatDate(ms) {
    if (typeof ms !== 'number' || !Number.isFinite(ms) || ms <= 0) return '';
    return new Date(ms).toISOString().slice(0, 10);

View on GitHub (pinned to 49907e53dc)

Solutions

Retry the request; this is usually transient.
Inspect the raw response (curl the same URL) to see what was actually returned.
Check proxy/TLS interception settings that may alter response bodies.

Example fix

// before
const json = await openreviewFetch(path, label);
// after
try { var json = await openreviewFetch(path, label); }
catch (e) { if (/Malformed JSON/.test(e.message)) { await sleep(1000); return openreviewFetch(path, label); } throw e; }

Defensive patterns

Strategy: retry

Try / catch

try { const json = await openreviewFetch(path, label); }
catch (e) { if (/Malformed JSON/.test(e.message)) { await sleep(1000); return openreviewFetch(path, label); } throw e; }

Prevention

Retry transient parse failures once or twice.
Bypass suspicious proxies that rewrite response bodies.
Log the raw response body when debugging.
Keep the HTTP client (Node version) current.

When it happens

Trigger: resp.json() throws: response body is HTML from a proxy/load-balancer error page, connection cut mid-body, gzip corruption, or an empty 200 response.

Common situations: Intermittent proxy interference; CDN or load balancer returning an error page with status 200; network interruption during transfer; OpenReview API returning malformed output under load.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid JSON response" and "Failed to parse response" errors: when an API answers 200 but the body isn't the JSON your library expected — this error's family across 28 libraries.

Parsing and encoding errors: unexpected token, malformed input — why parsers reject input and how to find the real culprit.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of jackwener/OpenCLI@49907e53dc (2026-08-29). Data as JSON: /api/errors/f2b9a62e06511749. Report an issue: GitHub.