CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jsonunixsed
shishy
shishy

Reputation: 817

Add brackets to beginning and end of file (JSON)

Forgive me if this is a trivial question, I don't have much experience with this.

I have a file that looks like this:

{text},
{text},
{text},
{text},

I want it to look like this

[{text},
 {text},
 {text},
 {text}]

Note that the final comma is removed, and that there are now square brackets at the beginning and end of the file.

So, I have thousands of files in a directory, and each file has to be fixed to do that.

I'm guessing I have to use sed somehow but I don't really know how to make it happen and don't want to do it manually using VIM since there are so many files...

EDIT:

I tried to use:

sed -i '1s/^/\[/;$s/,$/\]/' *

as suggested by codeforester. I get an error saying "Argument list too long"...

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3088

Answers (1)

hek2mgl
hek2mgl

Reputation: 158110

I would remove the existing comma at the end of the lines with sed and then use jq to build the json array:

sed 's/,$//' file | jq -s .

To run this over many files, I recommend to create a little shell script:

fix-json.sh

#!/bin/bash
file="${1}"
sed 's/,$//' "${file}" | jq -s . > "${file}.tmp"
if [ ${PIPESTATUS[1]} != 0 ] ; then
    echo "${file} is broken"
    rm "${file}.tmp"
else
    mv "${file}.tmp" "${file}"
fi

Now use find to run the above script on the input files:

chmod +x fix-json.sh 
find /path/to/files -type f -name '*.json' -exec ./fix-json.sh {} \;

Upvotes: 4

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