Question

I tried to parse a big JSON file using PHP and it always give me errors.
When I tried to validate the JSON file using http://jsonlint.com/ I encountered a lot of error in which there are some words separated by “unwanted” space and newline character like this:

{
                "id": "1",
                "qn
 ame": "detik.co.id.",
                "source": "undefined"
},  

notice the word “qname” is separated into “qn” and “ame”. between those two there are space and newline characters.

the correct one should look like this:

{
                    "id": "1",
                    "qname": "detik.co.id.",
                    "source": "undefined"
 },  

since there are a lot of similar error it would be painful to remove those characters manually one by one. Is there any quicker way to deal with this problem?

Answer 1

Depending on the data, you could just get rid of all the space and newline characters:

tr -d ' \n' < input_json.txt > spaceless_json.txt

But of course that will break if you have data with embedded spaces like:

"var one" : 1