How to parse a string of multiple jsons without separators in python?

Question

Given a single-lined string of multiple, arbitrary nested json-files without separators, like for example:

contents = r'{"payload":{"device":{"serial":213}}}{"payload":{"device":{"serial":123}}}'

How can contents be parsed into an array of dicts/jsons ? I tried

df = pd.read_json(contents, lines=True)

But only got a ValueError response:

ValueError: Unexpected character found when decoding array value (2)

Answer 1

You can split the string, then parse each JSON string into a dictionary:

import json

contents = r'{"payload":{"device":{"serial":213}}}{"payload":{"device":{"serial":123}}}'

json_strings = contents.replace('}{', '}|{').split('|')
json_dicts = [json.loads(string) for string in json_strings]

Output:

[{'payload': {'device': {'serial': 213}}}, {'payload': {'device': {'serial': 123}}}]