While this is surely a bug because it does not match Apache's parser, you can work around it by single-quoting your JSON.

Here's a previous instance of this problem and the solution: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/certbot-syntax-error-with-report-to-and-nel-header-in-apache-config/97940

alexzorin, thank for your reply, Yes I tried the single quotes, unfortunately my JSON parser then failed. My workaround is to regex the string before parsing, but ideally a fix in certbot.

It would be so great if the Apache project could publish a grammar for their configuration language!

@joohoi, are you an appropriate person to look at this at the moment and how would it interact with attempts to replace Certbot's parsing infrastructure?

@tim-hogan, thank you for the report, and @alexzorin, thank you for the diagnosis and forum reference.

We've made a lot of changes to Certbot since this issue was opened. If you still have this issue with an up-to-date version of Certbot, can you please add a comment letting us know? This helps us to better see what issues are still affecting our users. If there is no activity in the next 30 days, this issue will be automatically closed.

This is still a problem on version (0.31.0-2~deb10u1+ubuntu18.04.1+certbot+3)
The error is idenitical:
The error was: PluginError('There has been an error in parsing the file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/test.nz.conf on line 12: Syntax error',)

We've made a lot of changes to Certbot since this issue was opened. If you still have this issue with an up-to-date version of Certbot, can you please add a comment letting us know? This helps us to better see what issues are still affecting our users. If there is no activity in the next 30 days, this issue will be automatically closed.

This problem still exists on version 1.21.0
Regards
Tim