Importdescriptors not working (JSON parsing error)

Question

I have been trying to setup a watch-only wallet on Bitcoin Core using the importdescriptors command. To put this into context, I'm trying to use the watch-only wallet on my online machine to create PSBT then sign transactions on a different machine offline.

No matter how I type the command I always get "Error: Error parsing JSON:".

The command I typed is this one on testnet:

importdescriptors [{"desc":"pkh([0e40c862/44h/1h/0h]tpubDCaMqQiGwzuDcCigY2213yHeJqiQEeFKHPJ8KJdWdh6F6hcKjQmDNU4tdwVNQ7PUpSJfs8subNajEs27YpS5cyfet7LQSTsgCTsvqx3ted4/0/*)#8r64ejp4","timestamp":1694822561,"internal":false}]

From another post I noticed that was fixed by removing all spaces in the commands but that hasn't worked for me unfortunately. I’m using this command in bitcoin-qt console on ubuntu linux.

Any help appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

The entire JSON string needs to be surrounded by single quotes so that the console knows to pass the whole thing to the JSON parser.

Your command should be:

importdescriptors '[{"desc":"pkh([0e40c862/44h/1h/0h]tpubDCaMqQiGwzuDcCigY2213yHeJqiQEeFKHPJ8KJdWdh6F6hcKjQmDNU4tdwVNQ7PUpSJfs8subNajEs27YpS5cyfet7LQSTsgCTsvqx3ted4/0/*)#8r64ejp4","timestamp":1694822561,"internal":false}]'