How to extract multiple JSON objects from one file?

Update: I wrote a solution that doesn’t require reading the entire file in one go. It’s too big for a stackoverflow answer, but can be found here jsonstream.

You can use json.JSONDecoder.raw_decode to decode arbitarily big strings of “stacked” JSON (so long as they can fit in memory). raw_decode stops once it has a valid object and returns the last position where wasn’t part of the parsed object. It’s not documented, but you can pass this position back to raw_decode and it start parsing again from that position. Unfortunately, the Python json module doesn’t accept strings that have prefixing whitespace. So we need to search to find the first none-whitespace part of your document.

from json import JSONDecoder, JSONDecodeError
import re

NOT_WHITESPACE = re.compile(r'[^\s]')

def decode_stacked(document, pos=0, decoder=JSONDecoder()):
    while True:
        match = NOT_WHITESPACE.search(document, pos)
        if not match:
            return
        pos = match.start()
        
        try:
            obj, pos = decoder.raw_decode(document, pos)
        except JSONDecodeError:
            # do something sensible if there's some error
            raise
        yield obj

s = """

{"a": 1}  


   [
1
,   
2
]


"""

for obj in decode_stacked(s):
    print(obj)

prints:

{'a': 1}
[1, 2]