libxo VS ndjson.github.io

> In FreeBSD, this problem was solved with libxo[0]:

Libxo happens to be in the base system, but it is generally available:

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

* https://libxo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Or make it flexible:

> libxo - A Library for Generating Text, XML, JSON, and HTML Output

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo/

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/LibXo

Want structure? Ask for JSON or XML and parse. Otherwise it's the regular text output.

Can you trust it? Cli tool output is not exactly stable. I thought that's why libxo exists?

https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

Please consider https://github.com/Juniper/libxo or something even better than that.

That would look a lot like FreeBSD. Many of the FreeBSD userland tools are set up to use the excellent libxo (https://github.com/Juniper/libxo) to allow the user's choice of how things are output.

However, since every JSON document can be represented in a single line, something like newline-delimited JSON / JSON Lines feels like it would've been more suitable for that kind of data.

No one uses that format for streamed json, see ndson and jsonl

http://ndjson.org/

The size complaint is overblown, as repeated fields are compressed away.

As other folks rightfully commented, csv is a mine field. One should assume every CSV file is broken in some way. They also don't enumerate any of the downsides of CSV.

What people should consider is using formats like Avro or Parquet that carry their schema with them so the data can be loaded and analyzed without have to manually deal with column meaning.

What is ndjson? Newline delimited JSON is the format the Algolia CLI reads from and writes to files. This means that any command that passes ndjson formatted data as output or accepts it as input can be piped together with an Algolia CLI command! We’ll see more of this in the next example

You might consider using json-lines format (also known as newline-delimited JSON), in which each line is a separate JSON document so they can be loaded individually.

The format you're getting is known as Newline-Delimited JSON. Instead of trying to parse the whole input and pass that to the JSON Decoder, you can use something like bufio.Scanner to get and parse it line by line.

This is in oposition to NDJSON, which allows to split records without deserializing JSON itself, via e.g. read_lines. fwiw CSV suffers from the same problem as JSON - generally not possible to break into records without deserializing. It is worse than NDJSON because the character \n may appear at any position within an item, thus forbidding read_lines.

I've always seen it referred to as ndjson

I think this would be fine, as long as the CSV layer was still parsable using the RFC 4180, then you could still use a normal CSV parser to parse the CSV layer and a normal JSON parser to parse the JSON layer. My worry with your example is that it is nether format, so it will need custom serialisation and deserialisation logic as it is essentially a bran new format.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4180

If you’re looking for line-oriented JSON, another option would be ndjson: http://ndjson.org/