I am getting following error when running ng serve...
PS F:\\Projects\\RecipeApp> ng serve
Invalid JSON character: \"\\\"\" at 76:13.
Error: Invalid JSON char
In my case the problem was Visual Studio 2017 adding UTF-8 BOM characters to angular.json after I edited the file.
Permanent solution for Visual Studio and Angular CLI was to open the file once and save as UTF-8 without signature
File
-> Save As
.Save with Encoding...
.UTF-8 Without signature
-> Click OK
.