I have a huge JSON Array with multiple thousand objects and I need to filter all objects where the text field is too long (say 200 chars).
I've found a lot of SED/AWK advices to find a line with a certain length, but how can I delete that line AND the 1 before and the 2 after it; so that the whole JSON object is deleted?
The structure is like follows:
{
"text": "blah blah blah",
"author": "John Doe"
}
Thanks!
Here's a Python script that does what you want:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: ascii -*-
"""filter.py"""
import sys
# Get the file and the maximum line-length as command-line arguments
filepath = sys.argv[1]
maxlen = int(sys.argv[2])
# Initialize a list to store the unfiltered lines
lines = []
# Read the data file line-by-line
jsonfile = open(filepath, 'r')
for line in jsonfile:
# Only consider non-empty lines
if line:
# For "text" lines that are too line, remove the previous line
# and also skip the next two line
if "text" in line and len(line) > maxlen:
lines.pop()
next(jsonfile)
next(jsonfile)
# Add all other lines to the list
else:
lines.append(line)
# Strip trailing comma from the last object
lines[-2] = lines[-2].replace(',', '')
# Output the lines from the list
for line in lines:
sys.stdout.write(line)
You could run it like this:
python filter.py data.json 34
Suppose you had the following data file:
[
{
"text": "blah blah blah one",
"author": "John Doe"
},
{
"text": "blah blah blah two",
"author": "John Doe"
},
{
"text": "blah blah blah three",
"author": "John Doe"
}
]
Then running the script as described would produce the following output:
[
{
"text": "blah blah blah one",
"author": "John Doe"
},
{
"text": "blah blah blah two",
"author": "John Doe"
}
]
jq.