Load a from a text file containing multiple JSONs into Python

Question

I have a text file temp.txt of the sort --

{
 "names" : [ {"index" : 0, "cards": "\n\nbingo" ...} ]
 "more stuff": ...
}
{
 "names" : [ {"index" : 0, "cards": "\nfalse" ...} ]
 "more stuff": ...
}
.
.

Here's how I am trying to load it --

def read_op(filename):

    with open("temp.txt", 'r') as file:
        for line in file:
            print (json.load(line))    
   return lines

But this throws the error:

JSONDecodeError: Expecting property name enclosed in double quotes: line 2 column 1

I'm not sure what I am doing wrong here. Are there alternatives to reading this file another way?

That's not a JSON file - it contains many concatenated JSON structures. If it's not a large file, you should be able to break it up manually — inspectorG4dget
– inspectorG4dget, Commented Oct 6, 2022 at 17:38
Well, my advice would be to load the whole file at once and then work with the resulting blobs as JSON objects (I guess whatever is returned by the JSON parser). I think JSON requires the whole file to be just one object, so maybe an easy way is to read the entire file content as a string, concatenate [ and ] to the ends, and then parse the result as a JSON array. — Robert Dodier
– Robert Dodier, Commented Oct 6, 2022 at 17:38
@RobertDodier you would still need to concatenate the commas , to separate each object inside the array. — Carl HR
– Carl HR, Commented Oct 6, 2022 at 17:43

sid802 · Accepted Answer · 2022-10-06 18:41:16Z

5

Reading it line-by-line will not work because every line is not a valid JSON object by itself.

You should pre-process the data before loading it as a JSON, for example by doing the following:

Read the whole content
Add commas between every 2 objects
Add [] to contain the data
Load with json.loads

import re
import json

with open(r'test.txt', 'r') as fp:
    data = fp.read()
    concat_data = re.sub(r"\}\n\{", "},{", data)
    json_data_as_str = f"[{concat_data}]"
    json_data = json.loads(json_data_as_str)
    print(json_data)

edited Oct 6, 2022 at 18:41

answered Oct 6, 2022 at 17:54

sid802

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