bower error Unexpected string in JSON at position N

[wwarby]

I installed bower-npm-resolver because Chart.js stopped supporting Bower.

Following instructions from Chart.js I added the following to .bowerrc:

{
  "resolvers": [
    "bower-npm-resolver"
  ]
}

And ran:

npm install -g bower-npm-resolver
bower install npm:chart.js --save

Which added the following to bower.json: "chart.js": "npm:chart.js#^2.2.1",

And now I get an error, which goes away if I remove the above line. When I run "bower install" I now see:

bower error         Unexpected string in JSON at position 320

Stack trace:
SyntaxError: Unexpected string in JSON at position 320
    at Object.parse (native)
    at C:\Users\William Warby\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\bower\lib\core\Ma
nager.js:209:37
    at _fulfilled (C:\Users\William Warby\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\bower
\lib\node_modules\q\q.js:834:54)
    at self.promiseDispatch.done (C:\Users\William Warby\AppData\Roaming\npm\nod
e_modules\bower\lib\node_modules\q\q.js:863:30)
    at Promise.promise.promiseDispatch (C:\Users\William Warby\AppData\Roaming\n
pm\node_modules\bower\lib\node_modules\q\q.js:796:13)
    at C:\Users\William Warby\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\bower\lib\node_mo
dules\q\q.js:604:44
    at runSingle (C:\Users\William Warby\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\bower\
lib\node_modules\q\q.js:137:13)
    at flush (C:\Users\William Warby\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\bower\lib\
node_modules\q\q.js:125:13)
    at _combinedTickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:67:7)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:98:9)

It does seem to actually install all my Bower packages anyway, but obviously I'd prefer it to do so without the error. I'm using Node.js 6.2.0, Bower version 1.7.9.

[wwarby]

I just tried it the other way using: "npm+chart.js": "*",

This results in a different error: bower E404 Registry returned 404 for GET on http://registry.npmjs.org/hca-ims-web

hca-ims-web is the name in my bower.json file. It's a private application, so not published on the NPM registry. Here is my bower.json file:

{
    "name": "hca-ims-web",
    ...
    "private": true,
    "ignore": [
        "**/.*",
        "node_modules",
        "bower_components",
        "test",
        "tests"
    ],
    "dependencies": {
        ...
        "npm+chart.js": "*",
        ...
    }
}

[hiddestokvis]

I had the same thing, seems to be something with the version number which somehow creates a malformed .bower.json. I solved this by stepping one version (of chart.js) back:

"chart.js": "npm:chart.js#2.2.0",