getting more information from phantomjs "SyntaxError: Parse error" message

Run the file with node. If there is a parse error it will report it.

If the file is valid, then node will also try to run it, which will fail if your script depends on something not available in your node environment. So you'll have to ignore any runtime errors.

For example, given hello-world.js:

// Say Hello World twice
for (var i=0; i<2; i++) {
  console.log("Hello World") );
}

Run it with node:

node hello-world.js

Output:

/home/someone/somewhere/hello-world.js:3
  console.log("Hello World") );
                             ^
SyntaxError: Unexpected token )
    at Module._compile (module.js:439:25)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
    at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:497:10)
    at startup (node.js:119:16)
    at node.js:901:3

Your file.js contains an invalid syntax. You should check it with a syntax validator. An online tool which I have created can be one possible solution, check out http://esprima.org/demo/validate.html.

Getting More Information From PhantomJS

The next version of PhantomJS (presumably it will be 1.9.8, whatever comes after 1.9.7) will output errors like this:

SyntaxError: Parse error
http://localhost:9000/scripts/49e8b4f4.vendor.js:8

So that's slightly more useful than the current message.

Unfortunately there are no nightly builds for PhantomJS, so at this time you will need to compile your own version of master if you want to try this.

Debugging Minified files

If you are working with a minified file, often the line number won't be very helpful, and often debugging the un-minified file won't give you the parse error.

To solve this, once you get phantomjs to give you the name of the file, you can use the online demo of Esprima to get an actual parse of your JavaScript code:

http://esprima.org/demo/parse.html

From there, you can enter strategic line breaks to isolate the actual error.

Lint Tools are Sub-optimal for this use-case

A lint tool like jslint or jshint are more opinionated than a real parser, so if you are looking for a very specific syntax error, I would recommend using a real parser, since it will check only for code validity, and not opinionated styling guidelines. I'm not implying lint tools don't have value, just that they won't be as helpful for solving this type of problem.