Processing multiple JSON Objects in one file

Question

I did something stupid... I gathered a big tonne of json data and saved it in one file. I now find myself getting errors when I try JSON.parse(file) due to the fact that its JSON object after JSON object. Can anyone advise on how I can parse this data? The strcture looks as follows. The next entry is a object with the exact same structure.

{"purchase": 
  { 
   "amount": 34.595399, 
   "uid": 1282907706, 
   "user": 
          {
                 "id": xxxx
                 "name": "xxxx"
          }, 
    "dailycount": 135.82373100000001, 
    "productdetails": 
     {
          "type": "shoes"
     }, 
    "details": 
    {
          "gender": "male"
   }, 
   "createdin": "Asia/Tokyo", 
   "id": 147707740, 
   "comments": []}} 

Answer 1

Could you use the Search & Replace in your text editor? I mean, if you have a chunk of code like this:

{
   "a" : "b",
   "c" : "d"
}
{
   "a" : "e",
   "c" : "f",
}

You may turn it by searching for the }\s*{ sequence and replacing with the }, { sequence to something like this:

[
{
   "a" : "b",
   "c" : "d"
},
{
   "a" : "e",
   "c" : "f",
}
]

Answer 2

The problem, of course is that you dont have a valid json object.

irb(main):004:0> JSON.parse("{'foo':'bar'},{'foo':'baz'}")
JSON::ParserError: 705: unexpected token at '{'foo':'bar'},{'foo':'baz'}'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/json-1.4.6/lib/json/common.rb:146:in `parse'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/json-1.4.6/lib/json/common.rb:146:in `parse'
    from (irb):4

So, I would add a '"key": [' and a ']' before the end of your last curly brace. to make it valid json.

irb(main):018:0> json = '{"key" : [{"foo":"bar"}, {"foo":"baz"}]}'
=> "{\"key\" : [{\"foo\":\"bar\"}, {\"foo\":\"baz\"}]}"
irb(main):019:0> JSON.parse json
=> {"key"=>[{"foo"=>"bar"}, {"foo"=>"baz"}]}