Hello everybody.

This error occurs when this conditions are met:

1. You have node -v greater than 0.11.x (probably 0.12.x)
2. You are behind a proxy (probably your company’s)
3. You are using cordova-cli (that’s my guess, but it’s the same with ionic-cli)

The solution was not that easy to find on google, most of the people just treated it as a bug waiting to be fixed, but actually you can get your ‘cordova platform add’ in few seconds with these commands:

1. Analyse your request. Based on what you are trying to “cordova platform add [platform-name]” you are trying to retrieve a plugin. You should fin an url in the command line error like:

   $ cordova platform add android
   npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/cordova-android/4.0.0
   TypeError: Request path contains unescaped characters.
   ...

2. Visit the url https://registry.npmjs.org/cordova-android/4.0.0 and you will find a JSON. At the end of the JSON you should find these lines:

   "dist":{
     "shasum":"6a268b3....bc7f9ef6e6c1",
     "tarball":"http://registry.npmjs.org/cordova-android/-/cordova-android-4.0.0.tgz"
   }

    Get that tarball!

3. Untar your tarball in any folder you want. Then from cordova just type:

   cordova platform add /path/to/your/tarball/extracted/folder

Voilà! Cordova will add the platform as it was a “cordova platform add android” command. You can now run your build, emulate and run commands normally.

PS: Of course this is not a permanent fix, but a quick workaround.

Good luck!