Newline delimited JSON is awesome
The power of JSON without reading a whole JSON.
Whats wrong with JSON?
Nothing, JSON is a great format, it is the de-facto standard for data comunication and is supported everywhere.
So what is ndJSON?
ndJSON is a collection of JSON objects, separated by `\n`
So it’s one valid JSON object per line
Ok but why?
Personally i had a use case where I needed to:
- Store some logs
- I wanted the log entries to be JSON
- I wanted quick insertions
- I needed to query the last or last (n) items quickly
The problems
Since i wanted to store JSON a JSON-like database like MongoDB was the obvious choise, but i wanted to keep things very simple, I just wanted to store the logs in a text file.
So using a json file feeld obvious right?
Yes, but…
This would mean that in order to insert or read a record from the file i had to parse the whole file, which is far from ideal
ndJSON to the rescue
Since every entry is valid json it can be parsed/unmarshaled as a standlone JSON doument, no need do read the file in memory before parse
This makes the file streamable, knowing that every new line means a new entry i can read just as much lines i need to get the same amout of records
More info at http://ndjson.org
