jellex VS ijson

You could do something like this in pure python without the json loading boilerplate with jello[0]. An interactive TUI for jello called jellex[1} is also available. (I am the author)

[0] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jello

[1] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jellex

Also, Jellex is a TUI front-end to Jello that helps with interactively querying the JSON.

I wrote something similar to this to query JSON and JSON lines with python instead of awk for text. It’s called Jellex (Jello Explorer) which is a TUI front-end to Jello. Jello is a python analog to JQ.

https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jellex

There's a new TUI for jello now called jellex that can help you create your jello python filters faster and easier.

I made this TUI app using prompt-toolkit

> JSON’s design assumes the user can read the entire file into memory

No? The design of most JSON libraries assumes that, but there are perfectly good incremental JSON parsers out there[1–3]. It’s just that people don’t seem to have figured out a good API for not-completely-incremental parsing (please prove me wrong here!), but this applies equally to any structured data format as soon as you want to pull out pieces of data that are nested more than one level down.

The lack of length prefixes in JSON does indeed make a solid parser somewhat more difficult, but you get the ability to author and validate it manually instead. All in all a draw and not because of the incremental parsing thing.

(Tabular or otherwise homogeneous data is indeed reprsented wastefully, but unless the individual records are huge json+gzip is a perfectly serviceable “worse-is-better” solution.)

[1] https://github.com/ICRAR/ijson

[2] https://github.com/AMDmi3/jsonslicer

[3] https://github.com/danielyule/naya