Read package manifests with utf-8-sig so a BOM does not drop the package

[arpitjain099]

A package.json with a UTF-8 BOM makes the whole package vanish from the scan, and scan_errors stays empty, so nothing in the output says anything went wrong.

Same file twice, one with the three BOM bytes in front, scanned with the released scancode-toolkit 32.5.0:

$ scancode --package --json-pp - plain | jq '[.packages[].purl], (.dependencies|length)'
["pkg:npm/demo@1.0.0"]
1

$ scancode --package --json-pp - bom | jq '[.packages[].purl], (.dependencies|length), .files[1].scan_errors'
[]
0
[]

The input is not malformed. node -e "require('./package.json')" reads the BOM copy fine, and a BOM is what PowerShell's Out-File and several Windows editors write by default, so this shows up on real repositories rather than only in constructed cases.

The cause is the codec. Python's utf-8 does not consume a BOM, it decodes those bytes to U+FEFF, and json.load then raises with a message that names the fix:

json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Unexpected UTF-8 BOM (decode using utf-8-sig): line 1 column 1 (char 0)

recognize.py:155-162 catches that and continues without recording anything, which is why the failure is silent. Its sibling one layer up at plugin_package.py:481 does append the traceback to resource.scan_errors, so assembly failures are visible and parse failures are not.

I fixed the decode rather than the swallow, because the file is valid input and the package should be detected, not reported as an error. utf-8-sig is identical to utf-8 except that it consumes a leading BOM if one is present, so the swap is safe wherever a manifest is read, and grep -rn "utf-8-sig\|ufeff\|strip_bom" --include="*.py" src/ returned nothing before this, meaning there was no BOM handling anywhere to be consistent with. That is all 25 encoding='utf-8' sites in src/packagedcode/, across 15 handlers.

The swallow in recognize.py is worth fixing too, but it is a separate change with a wider blast radius, so I left it alone here.

Verification

tests/packagedcode/test_utf8_bom.py parametrizes four handlers that between them cover the JSON manifest shape (npm, bower, Composer, haxelib), once with a BOM and once without. The four BOM cases fail on develop with the JSONDecodeError above and pass with the change; the four no-BOM cases pass either way and are there so a regression in the plain path cannot hide.

For regressions I ran the tests for every handler I touched, before and after, against develop at 384b62a9: test_npm 94, test_rpm 76, test_conda 20, test_readme 17, test_conan 12, test_godeps 11, test_swift 11, test_phpcomposer 10, test_freebsd 9, test_bower 6, test_haxe 5, test_about 4, test_cran 2 all passed, and test_chef was 4 failed / 8 passed in both runs, so those four are pre-existing and unrelated.