How to read JSON error response from $http if responseType is arraybuffer

Edit: As @Paul LeBeau points out, my answer assumes that the response is ASCII encoded.

Basically you just need to decode the ArrayBuffer into a string and use JSON.parse().

var decodedString = String.fromCharCode.apply(null, new Uint8Array(data));
var obj = JSON.parse(decodedString);
var message = obj['message'];

I ran tests in IE11 & Chrome and this works just fine.

@smkanadl's answer assumes that the response is ASCII. If your response is in another encoding, then that won't work.

Modern browsers (eg. FF and Chrome, but not IE yet) now support the TextDecoder interface that allows you to decode a string from an ArrayBuffer (via a DataView).

if ('TextDecoder' in window) {
  // Decode as UTF-8
  var dataView = new DataView(data);
  var decoder = new TextDecoder('utf8');
  var response = JSON.parse(decoder.decode(dataView));
} else {
  // Fallback decode as ASCII
  var decodedString = String.fromCharCode.apply(null, new Uint8Array(data));
  var response = JSON.parse(decodedString);
}