How can I reformat a JSON file to contain an array

Question

I have a json file json_file which contains 2 records:

{"name": "XYZ", "address": "54.7168,94.0215", "country_of_residence": "PQR", "countries": "LMN;PQRST", "date": "28-AUG-2008", "type": null}
{"name": "OLMS", "address": null, "country_of_residence": null, "countries": "Not identified;No", "date": "23-FEB-2017", "type": null}

How can I reformat the file using python to make it have one array like this:

{
 "foo" : [
 {"name": "XYZ", "address": "54.7168,94.0215", "country_of_residence": "PQR", "countries": "LMN;PQRST", "date": "28-AUG-2008", "type": null},
 {"name": "OLMS", "address": null, "country_of_residence": null, "countries": "Not identified;No", "date": "23-FEB-2017", "type": null}
 ]
}

• el.pescado - нет войне: Your input file is not valid JSON - JSON allows for one top-level object.

Answer 1

As your json file is invalid, we need to read it line by line:

import json
input_file = """{"name": "XYZ", "address": "54.7168,94.0215", "country_of_residence": "PQR", "countries": "LMN;PQRST", "date": "28-AUG-2008", "type": null}
{"name": "OLMS", "address": null, "country_of_residence": null, "countries": "Not identified;No", "date": "23-FEB-2017", "type": null}"""
output_dict = dict()
output_dict['foo'] = list()
for line in input_file.split('\n'):
 json_line = json.loads(line)
 output_dict['foo'].append(json_line)
print(json.dumps(output_dict, indent=2))

Then we create your desired data structure, and append each line of json to that data structure.

Answer 2

Your file has a JSON object on each line, which technically isn't a valid JSON syntax. You can work around that by loading each line individually with json.loads() like this:

import json
json_filename = 'json_file'
with open(json_filename) as file:
 array = {'foo': []}
 foo_list = array['foo']
 for line in file:
 obj = json.loads(line)
 foo_list.append(obj)
print(json.dumps(array, indent=4))

{
 "foo": [
 {
 "name": "XYZ",
 "address": "54.7168,94.0215",
 "country_of_residence": "PQR",
 "countries": "LMN;PQRST",
 "date": "28-AUG-2008",
 "type": null
 },
 {
 "name": "OLMS",
 "address": null,
 "country_of_residence": null,
 "countries": "Not identified;No",
 "date": "23-FEB-2017",
 "type": null
 }
 ]
}