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I need to do some parsing of large (5-10 Gb)logfiles in Javascript/Node.js (I'm using Cube).
The logline looks something like:
10:00:43.343423 I'm a friendly log message. There are 5 cats, and 7 dogs. We are in state "SUCCESS".
We need to read each line, do some parsing (e.g. strip out 5, 7 and SUCCESS), then pump this data into Cube (https://github.com/square/cube) using their JS client.
Firstly, what is the canonical way in Node to read in a file, line by line?
It seems to be fairly common question online:
http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-read-a-file-line-by-line-in-node-js
Read a file one line at a time in node.js?
A lot of the answers seem to point to a bunch of third-party modules:
https://github.com/nickewing/line-reader
https://github.com/jahewson/node-byline
https://github.com/pkrumins/node-lazy
https://github.com/Gagle/Node-BufferedReader
However, this seems like a fairly basic task - surely, there's a simple way within the stdlib to read in a textfile, line-by-line?
Secondly, I then need to process each line (e.g. convert the timestamp into a Date object, and extract useful fields).
What's the best way to do this, maximising throughput? Is there some way that won't block on either reading in each line, or on sending it to Cube?
Thirdly - I'm guessing using string splits, and the JS equivalent of contains (IndexOf != -1?) will be a lot faster than regexes? Has anybody had much experience in parsing massive amounts of text data in Node.js?
I searched for a solution to parse very large files (gbs) line by line using a stream. All the third-party libraries and examples did not suit my needs since they processed the files not line by line (like 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ..) or read the entire file to memory
The following solution can parse very large files, line by line using stream & pipe. For testing I used a 2.1 gb file with 17.000.000 records. Ram usage did not exceed 60 mb.
First, install the event-stream package:
npm install event-stream
Then:
var fs = require('fs')
, es = require('event-stream');
var lineNr = 0;
var s = fs.createReadStream('very-large-file.csv')
.pipe(es.split())
.pipe(es.mapSync(function(line){
// pause the readstream
s.pause();
lineNr += 1;
// process line here and call s.resume() when rdy
// function below was for logging memory usage
logMemoryUsage(lineNr);
// resume the readstream, possibly from a callback
s.resume();
})
.on('error', function(err){
console.log('Error while reading file.', err);
})
.on('end', function(){
console.log('Read entire file.')
})
);
Please let me know how it goes!
You can use the inbuilt readline package, see docs here. I use stream to create a new output stream.
var fs = require('fs'),
readline = require('readline'),
stream = require('stream');
var instream = fs.createReadStream('/path/to/file');
var outstream = new stream;
outstream.readable = true;
outstream.writable = true;
var rl = readline.createInterface({
input: instream,
output: outstream,
terminal: false
});
rl.on('line', function(line) {
console.log(line);
//Do your stuff ...
//Then write to output stream
rl.write(line);
});
Large files will take some time to process. Do tell if it works.
I really liked #gerard answer which is actually deserves to be the correct answer here. I made some improvements:
Code is in a class (modular)
Parsing is included
Ability to resume is given to the outside in case there is an asynchronous job is chained to reading the CSV like inserting to DB, or a HTTP request
Reading in chunks/batche sizes that
user can declare. I took care of encoding in the stream too, in case
you have files in different encoding.
Here's the code:
'use strict'
const fs = require('fs'),
util = require('util'),
stream = require('stream'),
es = require('event-stream'),
parse = require("csv-parse"),
iconv = require('iconv-lite');
class CSVReader {
constructor(filename, batchSize, columns) {
this.reader = fs.createReadStream(filename).pipe(iconv.decodeStream('utf8'))
this.batchSize = batchSize || 1000
this.lineNumber = 0
this.data = []
this.parseOptions = {delimiter: '\t', columns: true, escape: '/', relax: true}
}
read(callback) {
this.reader
.pipe(es.split())
.pipe(es.mapSync(line => {
++this.lineNumber
parse(line, this.parseOptions, (err, d) => {
this.data.push(d[0])
})
if (this.lineNumber % this.batchSize === 0) {
callback(this.data)
}
})
.on('error', function(){
console.log('Error while reading file.')
})
.on('end', function(){
console.log('Read entirefile.')
}))
}
continue () {
this.data = []
this.reader.resume()
}
}
module.exports = CSVReader
So basically, here is how you will use it:
let reader = CSVReader('path_to_file.csv')
reader.read(() => reader.continue())
I tested this with a 35GB CSV file and it worked for me and that's why I chose to build it on #gerard's answer, feedbacks are welcomed.
I used https://www.npmjs.com/package/line-by-line for reading more than 1 000 000 lines from a text file. In this case, an occupied capacity of RAM was about 50-60 megabyte.
const LineByLineReader = require('line-by-line'),
lr = new LineByLineReader('big_file.txt');
lr.on('error', function (err) {
// 'err' contains error object
});
lr.on('line', function (line) {
// pause emitting of lines...
lr.pause();
// ...do your asynchronous line processing..
setTimeout(function () {
// ...and continue emitting lines.
lr.resume();
}, 100);
});
lr.on('end', function () {
// All lines are read, file is closed now.
});
The Node.js Documentation offers a very elegant example using the Readline module.
Example: Read File Stream Line-by-Line
const { once } = require('node:events');
const fs = require('fs');
const readline = require('readline');
const rl = readline.createInterface({
input: fs.createReadStream('sample.txt'),
crlfDelay: Infinity
});
rl.on('line', (line) => {
console.log(`Line from file: ${line}`);
});
await once(rl, 'close');
Note: we use the crlfDelay option to recognize all instances of CR LF ('\r\n') as a single line break.
Apart from read the big file line by line, you also can read it chunk by chunk. For more refer to this article
var offset = 0;
var chunkSize = 2048;
var chunkBuffer = new Buffer(chunkSize);
var fp = fs.openSync('filepath', 'r');
var bytesRead = 0;
while(bytesRead = fs.readSync(fp, chunkBuffer, 0, chunkSize, offset)) {
offset += bytesRead;
var str = chunkBuffer.slice(0, bytesRead).toString();
var arr = str.split('\n');
if(bytesRead = chunkSize) {
// the last item of the arr may be not a full line, leave it to the next chunk
offset -= arr.pop().length;
}
lines.push(arr);
}
console.log(lines);
I had the same problem yet. After comparing several modules that seem to have this feature, I decided to do it myself, it's simpler than I thought.
gist: https://gist.github.com/deemstone/8279565
var fetchBlock = lineByline(filepath, onEnd);
fetchBlock(function(lines, start){ ... }); //lines{array} start{int} lines[0] No.
It cover the file opened in a closure, that fetchBlock() returned will fetch a block from the file, end split to array (will deal the segment from last fetch).
I've set the block size to 1024 for each read operation. This may have bugs, but code logic is obvious, try it yourself.
Reading / Writing files using stream with the native nodejs modules (fs, readline):
const fs = require('fs');
const readline = require('readline');
const rl = readline.createInterface({
input: fs.createReadStream('input.json'),
output: fs.createWriteStream('output.json')
});
rl.on('line', function(line) {
console.log(line);
// Do any 'line' processing if you want and then write to the output file
this.output.write(`${line}\n`);
});
rl.on('close', function() {
console.log(`Created "${this.output.path}"`);
});
Based on this questions answer I implemented a class you can use to read a file synchronously line-by-line with fs.readSync(). You can make this "pause" and "resume" by using a Q promise (jQuery seems to require a DOM so cant run it with nodejs):
var fs = require('fs');
var Q = require('q');
var lr = new LineReader(filenameToLoad);
lr.open();
var promise;
workOnLine = function () {
var line = lr.readNextLine();
promise = complexLineTransformation(line).then(
function() {console.log('ok');workOnLine();},
function() {console.log('error');}
);
}
workOnLine();
complexLineTransformation = function (line) {
var deferred = Q.defer();
// ... async call goes here, in callback: deferred.resolve('done ok'); or deferred.reject(new Error(error));
return deferred.promise;
}
function LineReader (filename) {
this.moreLinesAvailable = true;
this.fd = undefined;
this.bufferSize = 1024*1024;
this.buffer = new Buffer(this.bufferSize);
this.leftOver = '';
this.read = undefined;
this.idxStart = undefined;
this.idx = undefined;
this.lineNumber = 0;
this._bundleOfLines = [];
this.open = function() {
this.fd = fs.openSync(filename, 'r');
};
this.readNextLine = function () {
if (this._bundleOfLines.length === 0) {
this._readNextBundleOfLines();
}
this.lineNumber++;
var lineToReturn = this._bundleOfLines[0];
this._bundleOfLines.splice(0, 1); // remove first element (pos, howmany)
return lineToReturn;
};
this.getLineNumber = function() {
return this.lineNumber;
};
this._readNextBundleOfLines = function() {
var line = "";
while ((this.read = fs.readSync(this.fd, this.buffer, 0, this.bufferSize, null)) !== 0) { // read next bytes until end of file
this.leftOver += this.buffer.toString('utf8', 0, this.read); // append to leftOver
this.idxStart = 0
while ((this.idx = this.leftOver.indexOf("\n", this.idxStart)) !== -1) { // as long as there is a newline-char in leftOver
line = this.leftOver.substring(this.idxStart, this.idx);
this._bundleOfLines.push(line);
this.idxStart = this.idx + 1;
}
this.leftOver = this.leftOver.substring(this.idxStart);
if (line !== "") {
break;
}
}
};
}
node-byline uses streams, so i would prefer that one for your huge files.
for your date-conversions i would use moment.js.
for maximising your throughput you could think about using a software-cluster. there are some nice-modules which wrap the node-native cluster-module quite well. i like cluster-master from isaacs. e.g. you could create a cluster of x workers which all compute a file.
for benchmarking splits vs regexes use benchmark.js. i havent tested it until now. benchmark.js is available as a node-module
import * as csv from 'fast-csv';
import * as fs from 'fs';
interface Row {
[s: string]: string;
}
type RowCallBack = (data: Row, index: number) => object;
export class CSVReader {
protected file: string;
protected csvOptions = {
delimiter: ',',
headers: true,
ignoreEmpty: true,
trim: true
};
constructor(file: string, csvOptions = {}) {
if (!fs.existsSync(file)) {
throw new Error(`File ${file} not found.`);
}
this.file = file;
this.csvOptions = Object.assign({}, this.csvOptions, csvOptions);
}
public read(callback: RowCallBack): Promise < Array < object >> {
return new Promise < Array < object >> (resolve => {
const readStream = fs.createReadStream(this.file);
const results: Array < any > = [];
let index = 0;
const csvStream = csv.parse(this.csvOptions).on('data', async (data: Row) => {
index++;
results.push(await callback(data, index));
}).on('error', (err: Error) => {
console.error(err.message);
throw err;
}).on('end', () => {
resolve(results);
});
readStream.pipe(csvStream);
});
}
}
import { CSVReader } from '../src/helpers/CSVReader';
(async () => {
const reader = new CSVReader('./database/migrations/csv/users.csv');
const users = await reader.read(async data => {
return {
username: data.username,
name: data.name,
email: data.email,
cellPhone: data.cell_phone,
homePhone: data.home_phone,
roleId: data.role_id,
description: data.description,
state: data.state,
};
});
console.log(users);
})();
I have made a node module to read large file asynchronously text or JSON.
Tested on large files.
var fs = require('fs')
, util = require('util')
, stream = require('stream')
, es = require('event-stream');
module.exports = FileReader;
function FileReader(){
}
FileReader.prototype.read = function(pathToFile, callback){
var returnTxt = '';
var s = fs.createReadStream(pathToFile)
.pipe(es.split())
.pipe(es.mapSync(function(line){
// pause the readstream
s.pause();
//console.log('reading line: '+line);
returnTxt += line;
// resume the readstream, possibly from a callback
s.resume();
})
.on('error', function(){
console.log('Error while reading file.');
})
.on('end', function(){
console.log('Read entire file.');
callback(returnTxt);
})
);
};
FileReader.prototype.readJSON = function(pathToFile, callback){
try{
this.read(pathToFile, function(txt){callback(JSON.parse(txt));});
}
catch(err){
throw new Error('json file is not valid! '+err.stack);
}
};
Just save the file as file-reader.js, and use it like this:
var FileReader = require('./file-reader');
var fileReader = new FileReader();
fileReader.readJSON(__dirname + '/largeFile.json', function(jsonObj){/*callback logic here*/});
I have a file which stores many JavaScript objects in JSON form and I need to read the file, create each of the objects, and do something with them (insert them into a db in my case). The JavaScript objects can be represented a format:
Format A:
[{name: 'thing1'},
....
{name: 'thing999999999'}]
or Format B:
{name: 'thing1'} // <== My choice.
...
{name: 'thing999999999'}
Note that the ... indicates a lot of JSON objects. I am aware I could read the entire file into memory and then use JSON.parse() like this:
fs.readFile(filePath, 'utf-8', function (err, fileContents) {
if (err) throw err;
console.log(JSON.parse(fileContents));
});
However, the file could be really large, I would prefer to use a stream to accomplish this. The problem I see with a stream is that the file contents could be broken into data chunks at any point, so how can I use JSON.parse() on such objects?
Ideally, each object would be read as a separate data chunk, but I am not sure on how to do that.
var importStream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, {flags: 'r', encoding: 'utf-8'});
importStream.on('data', function(chunk) {
var pleaseBeAJSObject = JSON.parse(chunk);
// insert pleaseBeAJSObject in a database
});
importStream.on('end', function(item) {
console.log("Woot, imported objects into the database!");
});*/
Note, I wish to prevent reading the entire file into memory. Time efficiency does not matter to me. Yes, I could try to read a number of objects at once and insert them all at once, but that's a performance tweak - I need a way that is guaranteed not to cause a memory overload, not matter how many objects are contained in the file.
I can choose to use FormatA or FormatB or maybe something else, just please specify in your answer. Thanks!
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.
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.
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
I had similar requirement, i need to read a large json file in node js and process data in chunks and call a api and save in mongodb.
inputFile.json is like:
{
"customers":[
{ /*customer data*/},
{ /*customer data*/},
{ /*customer data*/}....
]
}
Now i used JsonStream and EventStream to achieve this synchronously.
var JSONStream = require("JSONStream");
var es = require("event-stream");
fileStream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, { encoding: "utf8" });
fileStream.pipe(JSONStream.parse("customers.*")).pipe(
es.through(function(data) {
console.log("printing one customer object read from file ::");
console.log(data);
this.pause();
processOneCustomer(data, this);
return data;
}),
function end() {
console.log("stream reading ended");
this.emit("end");
}
);
function processOneCustomer(data, es) {
DataModel.save(function(err, dataModel) {
es.resume();
});
}
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!
I wrote a module that can do this, called BFJ. Specifically, the method bfj.match can be used to break up a large stream into discrete chunks of JSON:
const bfj = require('bfj');
const fs = require('fs');
const stream = fs.createReadStream(filePath);
bfj.match(stream, (key, value, depth) => depth === 0, { ndjson: true })
.on('data', object => {
// do whatever you need to do with object
})
.on('dataError', error => {
// a syntax error was found in the JSON
})
.on('error', error => {
// some kind of operational error occurred
})
.on('end', error => {
// finished processing the stream
});
Here, bfj.match returns a readable, object-mode stream that will receive the parsed data items, and is passed 3 arguments:
A readable stream containing the input JSON.
A predicate that indicates which items from the parsed JSON will be pushed to the result stream.
An options object indicating that the input is newline-delimited JSON (this is to process format B from the question, it's not required for format A).
Upon being called, bfj.match will parse JSON from the input stream depth-first, calling the predicate with each value to determine whether or not to push that item to the result stream. The predicate is passed three arguments:
The property key or array index (this will be undefined for top-level items).
The value itself.
The depth of the item in the JSON structure (zero for top-level items).
Of course a more complex predicate can also be used as necessary according to requirements. You can also pass a string or a regular expression instead of a predicate function, if you want to perform simple matches against property keys.
If you have control over the input file, and it's an array of objects, you can solve this more easily. Arrange to output the file with each record on one line, like this:
[
{"key": value},
{"key": value},
...
This is still valid JSON.
Then, use the node.js readline module to process them one line at a time.
var fs = require("fs");
var lineReader = require('readline').createInterface({
input: fs.createReadStream("input.txt")
});
lineReader.on('line', function (line) {
line = line.trim();
if (line.charAt(line.length-1) === ',') {
line = line.substr(0, line.length-1);
}
if (line.charAt(0) === '{') {
processRecord(JSON.parse(line));
}
});
function processRecord(record) {
// Process the records one at a time here!
}
I solved this problem using the split npm module. Pipe your stream into split, and it will "Break up a stream and reassemble it so that each line is a chunk".
Sample code:
var fs = require('fs')
, split = require('split')
;
var stream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, {flags: 'r', encoding: 'utf-8'});
var lineStream = stream.pipe(split());
linestream.on('data', function(chunk) {
var json = JSON.parse(chunk);
// ...
});
Using the #josh3736 answer, but for ES2021 and Node.js 16+ with async/await + AirBnb rules:
import fs from 'node:fs';
const file = 'file.json';
/**
* #callback itemProcessorCb
* #param {object} item The current item
*/
/**
* Process each data chunk in a stream.
*
* #param {import('fs').ReadStream} readable The readable stream
* #param {itemProcessorCb} itemProcessor A function to process each item
*/
async function processChunk(readable, itemProcessor) {
let data = '';
let total = 0;
// eslint-disable-next-line no-restricted-syntax
for await (const chunk of readable) {
// join with last result, remove CR and get lines
const lines = (data + chunk).replace('\r', '').split('\n');
// clear last result
data = '';
// process lines
let line = lines.shift();
const items = [];
while (line) {
// check if isn't a empty line or an array definition
if (line !== '' && !/[\[\]]+/.test(line)) {
try {
// remove the last comma and parse json
const json = JSON.parse(line.replace(/\s?(,)+\s?$/, ''));
items.push(json);
} catch (error) {
// last line gets only a partial line from chunk
// so we add this to join at next loop
data += line;
}
}
// continue
line = lines.shift();
}
total += items.length;
// Process items in parallel
await Promise.all(items.map(itemProcessor));
}
console.log(`${total} items processed.`);
}
// Process each item
async function processItem(item) {
console.log(item);
}
// Init
try {
const readable = fs.createReadStream(file, {
flags: 'r',
encoding: 'utf-8',
});
processChunk(readable, processItem);
} catch (error) {
console.error(error.message);
}
For a JSON like:
[
{ "name": "A", "active": true },
{ "name": "B", "active": false },
...
]
https.get(url1 , function(response) {
var data = "";
response.on('data', function(chunk) {
data += chunk.toString();
})
.on('end', function() {
console.log(data)
});
});
I think you need to use a database. MongoDB is a good choice in this case because it is JSON compatible.
UPDATE:
You can use mongoimport tool to import JSON data into MongoDB.
mongoimport --collection collection --file collection.json
I have a file which stores many JavaScript objects in JSON form and I need to read the file, create each of the objects, and do something with them (insert them into a db in my case). The JavaScript objects can be represented a format:
Format A:
[{name: 'thing1'},
....
{name: 'thing999999999'}]
or Format B:
{name: 'thing1'} // <== My choice.
...
{name: 'thing999999999'}
Note that the ... indicates a lot of JSON objects. I am aware I could read the entire file into memory and then use JSON.parse() like this:
fs.readFile(filePath, 'utf-8', function (err, fileContents) {
if (err) throw err;
console.log(JSON.parse(fileContents));
});
However, the file could be really large, I would prefer to use a stream to accomplish this. The problem I see with a stream is that the file contents could be broken into data chunks at any point, so how can I use JSON.parse() on such objects?
Ideally, each object would be read as a separate data chunk, but I am not sure on how to do that.
var importStream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, {flags: 'r', encoding: 'utf-8'});
importStream.on('data', function(chunk) {
var pleaseBeAJSObject = JSON.parse(chunk);
// insert pleaseBeAJSObject in a database
});
importStream.on('end', function(item) {
console.log("Woot, imported objects into the database!");
});*/
Note, I wish to prevent reading the entire file into memory. Time efficiency does not matter to me. Yes, I could try to read a number of objects at once and insert them all at once, but that's a performance tweak - I need a way that is guaranteed not to cause a memory overload, not matter how many objects are contained in the file.
I can choose to use FormatA or FormatB or maybe something else, just please specify in your answer. Thanks!
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.
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.
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
I had similar requirement, i need to read a large json file in node js and process data in chunks and call a api and save in mongodb.
inputFile.json is like:
{
"customers":[
{ /*customer data*/},
{ /*customer data*/},
{ /*customer data*/}....
]
}
Now i used JsonStream and EventStream to achieve this synchronously.
var JSONStream = require("JSONStream");
var es = require("event-stream");
fileStream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, { encoding: "utf8" });
fileStream.pipe(JSONStream.parse("customers.*")).pipe(
es.through(function(data) {
console.log("printing one customer object read from file ::");
console.log(data);
this.pause();
processOneCustomer(data, this);
return data;
}),
function end() {
console.log("stream reading ended");
this.emit("end");
}
);
function processOneCustomer(data, es) {
DataModel.save(function(err, dataModel) {
es.resume();
});
}
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!
I wrote a module that can do this, called BFJ. Specifically, the method bfj.match can be used to break up a large stream into discrete chunks of JSON:
const bfj = require('bfj');
const fs = require('fs');
const stream = fs.createReadStream(filePath);
bfj.match(stream, (key, value, depth) => depth === 0, { ndjson: true })
.on('data', object => {
// do whatever you need to do with object
})
.on('dataError', error => {
// a syntax error was found in the JSON
})
.on('error', error => {
// some kind of operational error occurred
})
.on('end', error => {
// finished processing the stream
});
Here, bfj.match returns a readable, object-mode stream that will receive the parsed data items, and is passed 3 arguments:
A readable stream containing the input JSON.
A predicate that indicates which items from the parsed JSON will be pushed to the result stream.
An options object indicating that the input is newline-delimited JSON (this is to process format B from the question, it's not required for format A).
Upon being called, bfj.match will parse JSON from the input stream depth-first, calling the predicate with each value to determine whether or not to push that item to the result stream. The predicate is passed three arguments:
The property key or array index (this will be undefined for top-level items).
The value itself.
The depth of the item in the JSON structure (zero for top-level items).
Of course a more complex predicate can also be used as necessary according to requirements. You can also pass a string or a regular expression instead of a predicate function, if you want to perform simple matches against property keys.
If you have control over the input file, and it's an array of objects, you can solve this more easily. Arrange to output the file with each record on one line, like this:
[
{"key": value},
{"key": value},
...
This is still valid JSON.
Then, use the node.js readline module to process them one line at a time.
var fs = require("fs");
var lineReader = require('readline').createInterface({
input: fs.createReadStream("input.txt")
});
lineReader.on('line', function (line) {
line = line.trim();
if (line.charAt(line.length-1) === ',') {
line = line.substr(0, line.length-1);
}
if (line.charAt(0) === '{') {
processRecord(JSON.parse(line));
}
});
function processRecord(record) {
// Process the records one at a time here!
}
I solved this problem using the split npm module. Pipe your stream into split, and it will "Break up a stream and reassemble it so that each line is a chunk".
Sample code:
var fs = require('fs')
, split = require('split')
;
var stream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, {flags: 'r', encoding: 'utf-8'});
var lineStream = stream.pipe(split());
linestream.on('data', function(chunk) {
var json = JSON.parse(chunk);
// ...
});
Using the #josh3736 answer, but for ES2021 and Node.js 16+ with async/await + AirBnb rules:
import fs from 'node:fs';
const file = 'file.json';
/**
* #callback itemProcessorCb
* #param {object} item The current item
*/
/**
* Process each data chunk in a stream.
*
* #param {import('fs').ReadStream} readable The readable stream
* #param {itemProcessorCb} itemProcessor A function to process each item
*/
async function processChunk(readable, itemProcessor) {
let data = '';
let total = 0;
// eslint-disable-next-line no-restricted-syntax
for await (const chunk of readable) {
// join with last result, remove CR and get lines
const lines = (data + chunk).replace('\r', '').split('\n');
// clear last result
data = '';
// process lines
let line = lines.shift();
const items = [];
while (line) {
// check if isn't a empty line or an array definition
if (line !== '' && !/[\[\]]+/.test(line)) {
try {
// remove the last comma and parse json
const json = JSON.parse(line.replace(/\s?(,)+\s?$/, ''));
items.push(json);
} catch (error) {
// last line gets only a partial line from chunk
// so we add this to join at next loop
data += line;
}
}
// continue
line = lines.shift();
}
total += items.length;
// Process items in parallel
await Promise.all(items.map(itemProcessor));
}
console.log(`${total} items processed.`);
}
// Process each item
async function processItem(item) {
console.log(item);
}
// Init
try {
const readable = fs.createReadStream(file, {
flags: 'r',
encoding: 'utf-8',
});
processChunk(readable, processItem);
} catch (error) {
console.error(error.message);
}
For a JSON like:
[
{ "name": "A", "active": true },
{ "name": "B", "active": false },
...
]
https.get(url1 , function(response) {
var data = "";
response.on('data', function(chunk) {
data += chunk.toString();
})
.on('end', function() {
console.log(data)
});
});
I think you need to use a database. MongoDB is a good choice in this case because it is JSON compatible.
UPDATE:
You can use mongoimport tool to import JSON data into MongoDB.
mongoimport --collection collection --file collection.json
I have a file which stores many JavaScript objects in JSON form and I need to read the file, create each of the objects, and do something with them (insert them into a db in my case). The JavaScript objects can be represented a format:
Format A:
[{name: 'thing1'},
....
{name: 'thing999999999'}]
or Format B:
{name: 'thing1'} // <== My choice.
...
{name: 'thing999999999'}
Note that the ... indicates a lot of JSON objects. I am aware I could read the entire file into memory and then use JSON.parse() like this:
fs.readFile(filePath, 'utf-8', function (err, fileContents) {
if (err) throw err;
console.log(JSON.parse(fileContents));
});
However, the file could be really large, I would prefer to use a stream to accomplish this. The problem I see with a stream is that the file contents could be broken into data chunks at any point, so how can I use JSON.parse() on such objects?
Ideally, each object would be read as a separate data chunk, but I am not sure on how to do that.
var importStream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, {flags: 'r', encoding: 'utf-8'});
importStream.on('data', function(chunk) {
var pleaseBeAJSObject = JSON.parse(chunk);
// insert pleaseBeAJSObject in a database
});
importStream.on('end', function(item) {
console.log("Woot, imported objects into the database!");
});*/
Note, I wish to prevent reading the entire file into memory. Time efficiency does not matter to me. Yes, I could try to read a number of objects at once and insert them all at once, but that's a performance tweak - I need a way that is guaranteed not to cause a memory overload, not matter how many objects are contained in the file.
I can choose to use FormatA or FormatB or maybe something else, just please specify in your answer. Thanks!
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.
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.
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
I had similar requirement, i need to read a large json file in node js and process data in chunks and call a api and save in mongodb.
inputFile.json is like:
{
"customers":[
{ /*customer data*/},
{ /*customer data*/},
{ /*customer data*/}....
]
}
Now i used JsonStream and EventStream to achieve this synchronously.
var JSONStream = require("JSONStream");
var es = require("event-stream");
fileStream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, { encoding: "utf8" });
fileStream.pipe(JSONStream.parse("customers.*")).pipe(
es.through(function(data) {
console.log("printing one customer object read from file ::");
console.log(data);
this.pause();
processOneCustomer(data, this);
return data;
}),
function end() {
console.log("stream reading ended");
this.emit("end");
}
);
function processOneCustomer(data, es) {
DataModel.save(function(err, dataModel) {
es.resume();
});
}
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!
I wrote a module that can do this, called BFJ. Specifically, the method bfj.match can be used to break up a large stream into discrete chunks of JSON:
const bfj = require('bfj');
const fs = require('fs');
const stream = fs.createReadStream(filePath);
bfj.match(stream, (key, value, depth) => depth === 0, { ndjson: true })
.on('data', object => {
// do whatever you need to do with object
})
.on('dataError', error => {
// a syntax error was found in the JSON
})
.on('error', error => {
// some kind of operational error occurred
})
.on('end', error => {
// finished processing the stream
});
Here, bfj.match returns a readable, object-mode stream that will receive the parsed data items, and is passed 3 arguments:
A readable stream containing the input JSON.
A predicate that indicates which items from the parsed JSON will be pushed to the result stream.
An options object indicating that the input is newline-delimited JSON (this is to process format B from the question, it's not required for format A).
Upon being called, bfj.match will parse JSON from the input stream depth-first, calling the predicate with each value to determine whether or not to push that item to the result stream. The predicate is passed three arguments:
The property key or array index (this will be undefined for top-level items).
The value itself.
The depth of the item in the JSON structure (zero for top-level items).
Of course a more complex predicate can also be used as necessary according to requirements. You can also pass a string or a regular expression instead of a predicate function, if you want to perform simple matches against property keys.
If you have control over the input file, and it's an array of objects, you can solve this more easily. Arrange to output the file with each record on one line, like this:
[
{"key": value},
{"key": value},
...
This is still valid JSON.
Then, use the node.js readline module to process them one line at a time.
var fs = require("fs");
var lineReader = require('readline').createInterface({
input: fs.createReadStream("input.txt")
});
lineReader.on('line', function (line) {
line = line.trim();
if (line.charAt(line.length-1) === ',') {
line = line.substr(0, line.length-1);
}
if (line.charAt(0) === '{') {
processRecord(JSON.parse(line));
}
});
function processRecord(record) {
// Process the records one at a time here!
}
I solved this problem using the split npm module. Pipe your stream into split, and it will "Break up a stream and reassemble it so that each line is a chunk".
Sample code:
var fs = require('fs')
, split = require('split')
;
var stream = fs.createReadStream(filePath, {flags: 'r', encoding: 'utf-8'});
var lineStream = stream.pipe(split());
linestream.on('data', function(chunk) {
var json = JSON.parse(chunk);
// ...
});
Using the #josh3736 answer, but for ES2021 and Node.js 16+ with async/await + AirBnb rules:
import fs from 'node:fs';
const file = 'file.json';
/**
* #callback itemProcessorCb
* #param {object} item The current item
*/
/**
* Process each data chunk in a stream.
*
* #param {import('fs').ReadStream} readable The readable stream
* #param {itemProcessorCb} itemProcessor A function to process each item
*/
async function processChunk(readable, itemProcessor) {
let data = '';
let total = 0;
// eslint-disable-next-line no-restricted-syntax
for await (const chunk of readable) {
// join with last result, remove CR and get lines
const lines = (data + chunk).replace('\r', '').split('\n');
// clear last result
data = '';
// process lines
let line = lines.shift();
const items = [];
while (line) {
// check if isn't a empty line or an array definition
if (line !== '' && !/[\[\]]+/.test(line)) {
try {
// remove the last comma and parse json
const json = JSON.parse(line.replace(/\s?(,)+\s?$/, ''));
items.push(json);
} catch (error) {
// last line gets only a partial line from chunk
// so we add this to join at next loop
data += line;
}
}
// continue
line = lines.shift();
}
total += items.length;
// Process items in parallel
await Promise.all(items.map(itemProcessor));
}
console.log(`${total} items processed.`);
}
// Process each item
async function processItem(item) {
console.log(item);
}
// Init
try {
const readable = fs.createReadStream(file, {
flags: 'r',
encoding: 'utf-8',
});
processChunk(readable, processItem);
} catch (error) {
console.error(error.message);
}
For a JSON like:
[
{ "name": "A", "active": true },
{ "name": "B", "active": false },
...
]
https.get(url1 , function(response) {
var data = "";
response.on('data', function(chunk) {
data += chunk.toString();
})
.on('end', function() {
console.log(data)
});
});
I think you need to use a database. MongoDB is a good choice in this case because it is JSON compatible.
UPDATE:
You can use mongoimport tool to import JSON data into MongoDB.
mongoimport --collection collection --file collection.json
I wan't to log into a file continuously, but after every 1000 lines I want to change to a new file. Now my method works like this:
var fs = require('fs');
...
var outputStream = fs.createWriteStream(fileName + '.csv');
outputStream.write(content, 'utf8', callback);
...
if (lineCounter === 1000) {
outputStream.end(function(err) {
outputStream = fs.createWriteStream(fileName2 + '.csv');
outputStream.write(content, 'utf8', callback);
});
}
In the end the files doesn't contains the last few lines. I'm open for any solution, I just need stream write into several files.
Thanks in advance!
At first I tried using the streams of Highland.js but I couldn't pause them for some reason. The script I am posting is tested and it is working. I share the original source at the end. So, I haven't actually start reading second file, but I believe it is easy now, as you have a point to proceed further after the script has reached the defined limit of lines.
var stream = require('stream'),
fs = require('fs'),
readStream = fs.createReadStream('./stream.txt', {highWaterMark: 15}),
limitStream = new stream.Transform(),
limit = 0
limitStream._transform = function(chunk, encoding, cb) {
if (++limit <= 5) {
console.log('before', limit)
return cb(null, chunk + '\n')
}
console.log('after',limit)
this.end()
cb()
}
limitStream.on('unpipe', function() { console.log('unpipe emitted from limitStream') })
limitStream.on('end', function() { console.log('end emitted from limitStream') })
readStream.pipe(limitStream).pipe(process.stdout)
Source: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/eGukJUQrOBY
After posting the answer, I found library, that can also work, but I admit that I haven't tested it. I just share it as a reference point: https://github.com/isaacs/truncating-stream