We are aware of the issue with the badge emails resending to everyone, we apologise for the inconvenience - learn more here.

Forum Discussion

indigo-cloud's avatar
indigo-cloud
Helpful | Level 5
6 months ago

Error Occurred Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: <.

We are using the API to connect to customer accounts and retrieve files waiting in Dropbox to be uploaded to a CRM system.

 

We are getting an error when we are trying to get a list of items in a give folder. The error is "Error Occurred Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: <."

 

We have established this is happening because instead of getting a list of files in JSON format, we are getting an error, in HTML format, as sown below:

 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
<title>Dropbox - 504</title>
<link href="https://cfl.dropboxstatic.com/static/metaserver/static/css/error.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="
https://cfl.dropboxstatic.com/static/images/favicon.ico"/>
</head>
<body>
<div class="figure">
<img src="
https://assets.dropbox.com/www/en-us/illustrations/spot/target-miss.svg" alt="Error: 504"/>
</div>
<div id="errorbox">
<h1>Error (504)</h1>Something went wrong. Don't worry, your files are still safe and the Dropbox team has been notified. Check out our <a href="
https://status.dropbox.com">Status Page</a> to see if there is a known incident, our <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/help">Help Center</a> and <a href="https://forums.dropbox.com">forums</a> for help, or head back to <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/home">home</a>.
</div>

 

</body>
</html>

 

So, now we can handle this error and alert the user. 

Recently, it is happening on every single call to a specific folder. There are many files in that folder, and we are wondering if this is a timeout or some sort of rate throttling.

Please can you advise.

 

This is an example of a response header we received today:

x-dropbox-request-id = "c22bbf15af53476f91e6ca51aa945773"

 

IP: 185.234.235.131