Parse large JSON file in Nodejs

As of October 2014, you can just do something like the following (using JSONStream) - https://www.npmjs.org/package/JSONStream

var fs = require('fs'),
    JSONStream = require('JSONStream'),

var getStream() = function () {
    var jsonData = 'myData.json',
        stream = fs.createReadStream(jsonData, { encoding: 'utf8' }),
        parser = JSONStream.parse('*');
    return stream.pipe(parser);
}

getStream().pipe(MyTransformToDoWhateverProcessingAsNeeded).on('error', function (err) {
    // handle any errors
});

To demonstrate with a working example:

npm install JSONStream event-stream

data.json:

{
  "greeting": "hello world"
}

hello.js:

var fs = require('fs'),
    JSONStream = require('JSONStream'),
    es = require('event-stream');

var getStream = function () {
    var jsonData = 'data.json',
        stream = fs.createReadStream(jsonData, { encoding: 'utf8' }),
        parser = JSONStream.parse('*');
    return stream.pipe(parser);
};

getStream()
    .pipe(es.mapSync(function (data) {
        console.log(data);
    }));

$ node hello.js
// hello world

Just as I was thinking that it would be fun to write a streaming JSON parser, I also thought that maybe I should do a quick search to see if there's one already available.

Turns out there is.

JSONStream "streaming JSON.parse and stringify"

Since I just found it, I've obviously not used it, so I can't comment on its quality, but I'll be interested to hear if it works.

It does work consider the following Javascript and _.isString:

stream.pipe(JSONStream.parse('*'))
  .on('data', (d) => {
    console.log(typeof d);
    console.log("isString: " + _.isString(d))
  });

This will log objects as they come in if the stream is an array of objects. Therefore the only thing being buffered is one object at a time.

To process a file line-by-line, you simply need to decouple the reading of the file and the code that acts upon that input. You can accomplish this by buffering your input until you hit a newline. Assuming we have one JSON object per line (basically, format B):

var stream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, {flags: 'r', encoding: 'utf-8'});
var buf = '';

stream.on('data', function(d) {
    buf += d.toString(); // when data is read, stash it in a string buffer
    pump(); // then process the buffer
});

function pump() {
    var pos;

    while ((pos = buf.indexOf('\n')) >= 0) { // keep going while there's a newline somewhere in the buffer
        if (pos == 0) { // if there's more than one newline in a row, the buffer will now start with a newline
            buf = buf.slice(1); // discard it
            continue; // so that the next iteration will start with data
        }
        processLine(buf.slice(0,pos)); // hand off the line
        buf = buf.slice(pos+1); // and slice the processed data off the buffer
    }
}

function processLine(line) { // here's where we do something with a line

    if (line[line.length-1] == '\r') line=line.substr(0,line.length-1); // discard CR (0x0D)

    if (line.length > 0) { // ignore empty lines
        var obj = JSON.parse(line); // parse the JSON
        console.log(obj); // do something with the data here!
    }
}

Each time the file stream receives data from the file system, it's stashed in a buffer, and then pump is called.

If there's no newline in the buffer, pump simply returns without doing anything. More data (and potentially a newline) will be added to the buffer the next time the stream gets data, and then we'll have a complete object.

If there is a newline, pump slices off the buffer from the beginning to the newline and hands it off to process. It then checks again if there's another newline in the buffer (the while loop). In this way, we can process all of the lines that were read in the current chunk.

Finally, process is called once per input line. If present, it strips off the carriage return character (to avoid issues with line endings – LF vs CRLF), and then calls JSON.parse one the line. At this point, you can do whatever you need to with your object.

Note that JSON.parse is strict about what it accepts as input; you must quote your identifiers and string values with double quotes. In other words, {name:'thing1'} will throw an error; you must use {"name":"thing1"}.

Because no more than a chunk of data will ever be in memory at a time, this will be extremely memory efficient. It will also be extremely fast. A quick test showed I processed 10,000 rows in under 15ms.

I realize that you want to avoid reading the whole JSON file into memory if possible, however if you have the memory available it may not be a bad idea performance-wise. Using node.js's require() on a json file loads the data into memory really fast.

I ran two tests to see what the performance looked like on printing out an attribute from each feature from a 81MB geojson file.

In the 1st test, I read the entire geojson file into memory using var data = require('./geo.json'). That took 3330 milliseconds and then printing out an attribute from each feature took 804 milliseconds for a grand total of 4134 milliseconds. However, it appeared that node.js was using 411MB of memory.

In the second test, I used @arcseldon's answer with JSONStream + event-stream. I modified the JSONPath query to select only what I needed. This time the memory never went higher than 82MB, however, the whole thing now took 70 seconds to complete!

Parse large JSON file in Nodejs

Tags:

Javascript

File

Json

Node.Js

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