Jason Long

JSON Lines is a versatile and user-friendly format for storing structured data, making it an excellent choice for log files and passing messages between processes. This format allows for the encoding of Unicode strings with ASCII escape sequences, ensuring compatibility with plain ASCII files. JSON Lines files consist of valid JSON values, with each line serving as a separate record. The line separator is '\n', and additional whitespace is implicitly ignored when parsing JSON values. To save space, stream compressors like gzip or bzip2 are recommended, resulting in .jsonl.gz or .jsonl.bz2 files.

JSON Lines files may also be saved with the file extension .jsonl and the MIME type may be application/jsonl. This format works seamlessly with unix-style text processing tools and shell pipelines, offering a flexible and efficient solution for working with structured data.